


ain't really quaint

by quietnight, silentwalrus



Series: farm hell [1]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fanart, Feral Cows, M/M, Straw Effigies, The Idiot's Guide To Making Lemonade, Turnips, Walmart Just Does That To People, West Virginia, art by quietnight, farmer identity theft is a crime steven, not enough daddy kink to justify the tag, some homophobic language, this isn't crack you cowards
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-03
Updated: 2019-04-01
Packaged: 2019-07-06 04:30:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 44,045
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15878580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight, https://archiveofourown.org/users/silentwalrus/pseuds/silentwalrus
Summary: Natasha stops by on a Tuesday, early enough in the morning that it would have been late by Steve’s old standards. Now, though, it takes him nearly three minutes just to limp to the door, yawning, and when he opens it he has to lean heavily on the doorframe.“Hi,” Natasha says, over the beginnings of birdsong. She’s not alone. “Can we come in?”





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this is a wildly speculative take on 616-Captain America Steve and Bucky, mashed into MCU CA:TWS, plus whatever the hell tweaking i felt like, and dont even try to make any timelines or anything match up. It's farm hell steve. The title is from Amish Paradise by Weird Al Yankovic. What else needs to be said
> 
> thank you so much to quietnight, who drew the embedded illustration and proofread this, and also a big thanks to galwednesday, skellerbvvt, jhsc, aggressivewhenstartled, magdaliny and of course karen who is 100% the most guilty of bringing my sainted hands to this gun and pulling the fucking trigger

 

Natasha stops by on a Tuesday, early enough in the morning that it would have been late by Steve’s old standards. Now, though, it takes him nearly three minutes just to limp to the door, yawning, and when he opens it he has to lean heavily on the doorframe.

“Hi,” Natasha says, over the beginnings of birdsong. She’s not alone. “Can we come in?”

“Sure,” Steve says, standing well aside. Natasha is wearing a leather jacket two sizes too big, covering body armor, and Steve can pick out the very edges of an abrasion on her forehead, masterfully covered in foundation. Behind her stalks a man in black fatigues, his lank, dark hair hanging past his chin, and he’s got the kind of crazy eyes Steve last saw on Natasha when she first came in and started making life decisions that didn’t lead to being a drugged-up teenage mercenary.

Steve makes no effort whatsoever to mitigate the limp as he shuts the door and goes to the kitchen. “Can I get you anything to drink?” he offers, glancing over his shoulder in time to see Natasha direct the man to pull out a chair and sit via chin tilt and subtle hand gesture. “I’m making tea.”

“Tea, yes please,” Natasha says. There’s a creak from the ancient wooden chairs as she sits down too.

“Who’s your friend?” Steve asks, not really expecting a straight answer.

“This is… Soldier,” Natasha says, nodding at him. He’s deathly still, but something about him still makes him look like he’s vibrating. “Soldier, this is Steve.”

Soldier turns his burning eyes Stevewards. He’s got lines scored into his face under all that hair and stubble, his skin waxy, but Steve can tell he’s not as old as he looks. Poor kid.

“Nice to meet you,” he says aloud, feeling the familiar diorama-puppet sensation of being undercover. As himself, apparently. “Natasha’s an old friend of mine. How do you know each other?”

“We’re old friends too,” Natasha says. “Coworkers, for a while. He needs a place to stay between jobs.”

The euphemisms must be for the kid’s benefit, because Natasha never bothers talking spy at Steve anymore. Not when she doesn’t have to. “I see,” Steve says, playing his part. “Anything I can do to help?”

“You got room for one more here?” Natasha says. It’s not a question. For whatever reason, she needs to park this guy here for however long and she either can’t tell Steve - unlikely - or doesn’t want to say in front of Soldier. To be fair, the guy doesn’t look like he’d understand many words right now, or at least not any that aren’t along the lines of “get him” or maybe “open fire”.

Either way, the point is moot. Natasha never does anything without damn good reason. “Sure,” Steve says. “I can get the spare bedroom made up.”

“Good idea,” Natasha says, in a way that means _yes go do that now._ Steve obligingly stands, holding in a groan as he pushes up from the table.

The spare bedroom is at the back, but the farmhouse must’ve been built sometime even before Steve was born and these walls aren’t anywhere near soundproof. “Soldier,” Natasha says in Russian, hardly muffled. “Stay with Steve. He’ll help you. If anyone comes after you here, there are defenses.”

“He is an invalid.” Soldier’s voice is thin and raspy and lighter than Steve expected.

“Steve’s a lot tougher than he looks. He has a lot of experience. And he heals fast. He’s out here on medical leave and it’s temporary. He’s here because this is the most secure safehouse I have. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll come back once I’ve eliminated complicating factors.”

“Understood,” Soldier says, managing to sound reluctant with a voice about as expressive as a greyscale flowchart. 

Steve finishes sacking the pillow and goes back out to the kitchen. “Room’s ready,” he says, limping to the counter to check on the tea. Not quite steeped. He pours himself a mug anyway. “Anything else you need?”  

“Show him the defenses,” Natasha says, pushing a bulky-looking phone and a thick wad of hundred dollar bills across the table. “Here’s grocery money.”

“You spoil me,” Steve says dryly.  

“Make sure you buy yourself something nice,” Natasha says, giving him just the fastest flicker of a grin. “If you send a message on this phone it’ll reach me. I’ll come visit once I take care of a few things.”

“Sure,” Steve says, pouring Natasha’s tea and placing it on the table. Her pal Soldier watches dubiously. “Anything we should watch out for?”

“Just the usual,” Natasha says. “Do what you usually do when stormtroopers come down out of the sky. Between the two of you, I’m not worried.”  

Soldier gives Natasha a look that says he _is_ worried, and that he’s got a ten page letter to the editor ready to go on the subject of Steve’s competence. “Alright,” Steve says. “Everything okay out there?”

Natasha flashes a slightly longer, meaner smile. “Just a few old friends cropping up where they shouldn’t be.”

Natasha only ever says _old friends_ like that when it’s her quote-unquote former affiliations in Russia. Steve would ask if she needs help, but she has a pretty spectacular track record in that department and he knows very well she prefers to handle those cases alone. Or without witnesses, rather.

“Good luck,” he tells her instead. “But you’d better stay for dinner when you visit next.”

That, finally, gets a real Natasha smile, the one she gets when she’s laughing at a private joke. “Don’t worry,” she says, nodding at Soldier. “I’m sure you two will keep each other company.”

Natasha leaves the way she came, her car - a nondescript beige sedan - rolling bumpily away down the weedy gravel drive to the farm. Steve watches her go, steaming mug in hand, then digs his personal phone out of his pocket. Sam got him hooked on the damn color matching game and now the stupid computer even joins him in the bathroom. He’s becoming a youth in his old age.

He unlocks the phone. There’s a message from a server-based relay service disguised as a software update notification, which usually means Natasha is feeling especially paranoid. Steve taps in the passcode, then scans his thumb, then types in another four passwords.

_POW. Brainwashed, amnesia, probably other head trauma. He’s enhanced, like you are. Got used as a shock trooper and assassin. Don’t rattle his worldview too hard all at once, you know how the deprogramming goes. Will probably decide you’re a handler._

Then, in a separate message bubble: _He’s a good person._

Steve scratches his beard. Natasha’s judgments - both personnel and personal -  tend to be as sound as anyone’s get. And if she needs to park this guy here, then it’s probably the best possible thing for him. Or for her. Either way, Steve trusts her reasons are sound.

A roommate of dubious sanity who’s strong, trained and might violently try to kill him. Well, why not. It’ll be just like Basic.

Steve pockets his phone again and limps back out to the kitchen. By all appearances Soldier hasn’t moved, staring at Natasha’s mug of tea like it’s about to tell his fortune, but Steve is utterly unsurprised to see that both phone and money have vanished from the kitchen table. “You got a first name, friend?” Steve asks.

Soldier slowly transfers his lizard gaze to Steve. “No.”

“Soldier it is, then,” Steve says. “You want the house tour?”

Soldier seems to reanimate a little. He really doesn’t look healthy, his skin bluish and pasty and his hair begging for a wash. “The defenses,” he says woodenly.

Steve scratches his chin and looks around. “Well, that over there is my cane,” he says experimentally. Does the kid even have a sense of humor? “It catches me a pretty good wallop every time I trip over it.”

Soldier does not look like he appreciates the joke. Too bad. “The property’s got a fence,” Steve continues. “I haven’t been all the way around it but it’s a pretty big patch of land…”

Soldier is managing to look appalled, horrified and apoplectic with rage without moving a single facial muscle. “And there’s some kind of laser grid over the whole thing,” Steve allows. “It’s automatic. The controls are in the outhouse but since the spider nest in there is the size of my head I think they’re pretty tamper-proof.”

Now Soldier looks like he’s having a very quiet aneurysm. “C’mon,” Steve says, unable to resist enjoying himself. This is the most entertainment he’s had since the feral cats chased a chipmunk into his bedroom. “I’ll show you the works.”

The sun is starting to peek over the horizon as Steve collects the cane and stumps out onto the porch. Soldier marches angrily behind, his boots clomping on the ancient wooden boards.

The farm is halfway to dilapidated, empty for a few years before Natasha rented or bought it or otherwise acquired it through various means. Hell, maybe it’s abandoned and Steve’s technically squatting. It had been a pretty fancy property once - there’s a big greenhouse right next to the house, sturdily built even though now a lot of the glass panes on the lower levels are broken or missing, and it’s got sliding panels that are currently rusted in permanently open positions. There’s a barn, too, full of popped hay bales and approximately a dozen half-feral cats.

“I haven’t worked the property much,” Steve tells Soldier, taking him around. “But there’s chickens and a vegetable patch and an orchard, though that’s pretty overgrown. And back there are the beehives.”

“Beehives,” Soldier says, the same way Steve’s heard fresh faced GIs say _minefield._

“Yeah. There’s twelve or so, depending on whether they swarm or not. I go and get some honey every so often. Don’t worry,” Steve adds cheerfully. “They hardly sting.”

“Hardly.”

“It’s the chickens you gotta watch out for,” Steve says, going to the main shed. He opens the door on the heavy rubber apron, thick oven mitts and ballistic goggles, then glances back at Soldier, who is watching all this with mounting horror. “Wanna help me collect the eggs?”

Soldier does not want to help collect eggs, judging by the rictus of distaste on his face. “You’re right,” Steve allows. “We should go visit Bessie first.”

He can't exactly pinpoint the moment he made the actual decision to fuck with the Soldier, but he thinks it might’ve been between ten to fifteen seconds after he heard the word _invalid._ And it’s not even going to be _fucking_ with him, per se. Steve’s just going to… live up to expectations.

-o-

Soldier does not understand what is going on.

He had been ordered to eliminate the Widow and Captain America and make it look like Widow had done it. He downed Captain America, but then the Widow and some crazed blonde in nurse’s scrubs with a fucking semiautomatic had chased him halfway across DC while Captain America somehow crawled out of the Potomac, rebooted his wings and thwarted an Alpha STRIKE ambush by opening them in a closed elevator. Soldier is still, after everything, stung by the fact that Alpha STRIKE was deployed at all. As if he couldn’t handle two fucking targets.  

But then the Widow cornered him, and - he remembered her. And she remembered him. They understood that they had forgotten. Been made to forget. And they had both hesitated, which had given Captain America enough time to swoop in and kick Soldier in the head.

He’d gotten wiped again over that. He doesn’t know what the fuck happened to Widow between then and their flight to New Jersey, but it must have been just as bad because she mined a fucking bridge, shot a rocket launcher at his jeep and forced him to abandon the fucking blazing fireball and storm Lehigh on foot. And he was angry, so fucking angry, but it was like she was _possessed_ and she lured him down into the bunker and she kept _saying_ things. She said things like _what else did you forget_ and _I got away. I got away from them_ and _I can help you. You can too._

And when the bunker systems had activated, and Soldier froze, because the voice - the face - the doctor - and Widow -

\-  had not frozen. She’d kicked a grating out from under Soldier and dropped him down a story, and while the fucking _voice_ droned on she emptied a clip into the source, and when that didn’t cut it off she jumped down into the pit with Soldier, and either she’d boobytrapped the place a whole lot more thoroughly than he’d expected or the bunker was struck by a missile, because that’s when _everything_ fucking exploded.

And then, when they were coughing and half blinded and digging themselves out of the rubble, she had _kept trying to talk to him._ She had said, again, _I can help you._

He had said, _you can’t. I can’t._ She had said, _I can._ She had said, _all we have to do is make you disappear._

She brought him here.

And now, this, this _person,_ in horrible grass-stained jeans and the world’s tiniest shirt clinging miserably to his freakishly proportioned body, is supposed to be his - guard. His keeper. This towheaded idiot who manages to look like he’s prancing despite a highly pronounced limp. When HYDRA comes to kill them all, he won’t even be any good as a meatshield. Not with that kind of waist.

They enter the barn. By the entrance is a pile of metallic tubes and canisters and suction attachments that Soldier would one thousand percent label torture implements if there hadn’t been a faded stencil of a grinning cow proclaiming them _FARMER JIM’S GRADE A DAIRY FITTINGS._

There’s also a _live_ cow. It can’t be anything else. It’s got hair longer than Soldier’s and it looks like a piece of luggage on legs, but it’s got four hooves and it’s in a barn.

“That’s Bessie,” the… Steve… says, pointing at the cow.

It burps. Soldier recoils. Fucking Steve glances at him, grins, and for no single discernable reason at all goes to kick over a tin bucket and then a short stool. Soldier watches them clatter to a stop adjacent to Bessie. He does not understand what is about to happen until Fucking Steve squats unsteadily on the low stool, swearing under his breath.

Bessie continues chewing, and does not turn her head even as Fucking Steve reaches out and grabs hold of the wobbly pink thing hanging off her belly.

“Took me a while to learn how to do this at first, but once you get into the rhythm of it it’s easy,” Fucking Steve says, like he’s not groping the tumorous growth of a fucking bovine. “You just gotta do a really gentle squeeze.”

That raises more questions than it answers. Soldier, rooted to the spot, has no choice but to watch Fucking Steve lovingly tug at the private parts of a two-ton cud-chewing farm animal.

Bessie turns her enormous head and makes limpid eye contact with Soldier over the sound of something liquid jetting loudly into the tin bucket. Helplessly, Soldier stares back. It’s still safer than whatever it is that’s happening between Fucking Steve and the horrible pink tumor.

Fucking Steve starts whistling. The bucket fills up. At one point the cow extends something that can only be its tongue, a necrotic grey appendage easily two feet long, and uses it to explore one cavernous nostril.

The last dribbles of cow juice squirt noisily into the bucket. Fucking Steve, seeming not at all harrowed by this experience, pulls a tin cup off a hook in the stall and dips it in. It comes up full of frothy white… stuff. “Want a sip?” Fucking Steve says, slurping from the cup.

Soldier turns around and walks out of the barn.

-o-

As soon as Soldier is out of hearing range Steve spits his mouthful of raw cow milk onto the hay, and spits again to get the taste out of his mouth. Once accomplished, he stares at “Bessie.”

“One day I’m going to figure out whose cow you are. And how you got in this barn.”

Bessie chews her cud and stubbornly refuses to provide any answers.

“Freeloader,” Steve adds. “Guess you _were_ technically first, though.”

Bessie gurgles alarmingly. Steve struggles up off the stool and beats it out of there before she decides to gift him with any more liquids.

-o-

**_x3642bq9863z29:_ ** _requesting expedited exfil_

**_P3849s:_ ** _?_

**_x3642bq9863z29:_ ** _IMG.3_

**_x3642bq9863z29:_ ** _IMG.2_

**_P3849s:_ ** _that's a cicada_

**_P3849s:_ ** _local fauna within expected norms_

**_x3642bq9863z29:_ ** _SEE IMG.4 ATTACHED_

**_P3849s:_ ** _bullfrog. also normal_

**_P3849s:_ ** _you’ll be fine, soldier. Sit tight._

**_P3849s:_ ** _:)_

-o-

Steve makes breakfast, adding another three eggs to the omelet and some bacon on the assumption that Soldier will have to eat sometime. He mixes up cat food in a big salad bowl and takes it out to the barn - no sign of Soldier, but Steve can definitely feel a glower aimed directly between his shoulder blades - and goes back inside. Typically the cats wake up in time for lunch, so he’ll come back to collect the bowl around noon.

Twenty minutes later when Soldier still hasn’t been lured inside the house by the smell and sound of cooking eggs and bacon, Steve ventures back out to the barn and sticks his head in. He still can’t see anything, but the air feels significantly lighter this time, like maybe Soldier _can_ smell breakfast waiting and is waffling about whether or not he wants to risk coming inside. Then Steve looks down at the salad bowl on the floor.

Empty.

Steve stares at it.

“If you want people food next time, breakfast starts at seven,” Steve says to the air. It says nothing back. “I promise it’s better than cat mush.”

The air maintains a doubtful silence.

Steve shrugs and turns back into the house. He’s cooked enough for one and a half supersoldiers, because he still can’t tell how much Soldier actually _eats,_ but considering how Steve’s still on the mend himself, the overall spread isn't much. Maybe about four normal people portions.

He’ll put aside a plate for Soldier if he decides he wants real breakfast after all.

The bacon, though. Steve’s only just started moving off the easy digestion diet, given all the various horse pills he was taking just to keep his insides in, and he’s not ashamed to say he’s been relishing the trips to town where he can a) drive and b) buy meat. His first steak in six months had been heavenly. His body had promptly made him regret it, but Steve can’t call himself a quitter and especially not when it comes to steak. Not when it comes to bacon, either.

If Soldier decides he wants bacon Steve will make more. After all, Steve’s an invalid. He’s got weight to gain back.

Petty thoughts or no, Steve does, in fact, have pills to swallow and PT to do, so with an audible creak of joints he cleans up after breakfast and goes to do some tai chi.

After that it’s the daily battle with The Naps. He actually finds it easier to fall asleep for his scheduled naps outside in the field than inside the house in his own bed like a normal person, like his body knows what he’s trying to trick it into doing and does not appreciate it one bit. Usually he has no trouble outside; the heat of the sun and the soft grass and a thick blanket make him feel naturally drowsy.

Usually. At one o’clock when Steve shakes out his blanket over his favorite patch, he definitely feels Soldier’s gaze boring into the back of his head. That’s talent. Steve’s still got no idea where he is and the stare feels like it’s coming from all directions.

It’s mildly unsettling. Steve lies down on his stomach, pillows his head on his arms, shuts his eyes, and tries to ignore the faint buzzing sensation all over his body. The sun’s pleasantly warm with the slight cloud cover, and the grass makes a comfortable thick carpet underneath him. It’ll be easy to drift off like this.

At two o’clock the buzzing has intensified to the point of being _deeply fucking uncomfortable._ It’s the psychic equivalent of someone running a drill next to his ear. Steve rolls over onto his back, eyes still resolutely shut. Maybe if he impersonates a dry log, Soldier will become bored and quit.

At two thirty Steve remembers that Soldier is an assassin and is probably used to staking out targets for days on end, and in conditions much worse than these.

Steve rolls up the blanket and goes back into the house.

He ventures outside again in late afternoon. He’s surprised to see Soldier out in the open, or at least somewhat visible, sitting in the bushes under the apple tree and looking parboiled and bitter in his thick black fatigues. He immediately levels a vengeful glare at Steve on the porch, but it loses a little something when it’s coming from someone so desperately sweaty.

Steve takes pity on him and limps over to the greenhouse, turning the spigot to let the water flow into the evaporation basin and start filling up the trough. "You want to help me round up some veggies for supper?"

Soldier promptly stands like he’s been given an order, but Steve’s heartened by the familiar look of furious resentment as Soldier follows him out into the garden. The vegetable bed is wildly overgrown, but Steve can recognize some of the same scraggly green tops he'd pulled up on the Western Front, once upon a time. He sends Soldier to the shed to get a basket and lowers himself onto the ground, which takes a good ninety seconds but only makes him swear twice, so he’s definitely on the mend.

By the time Soldier rounds the corner of the house, Steve has just pulled the first turnip. He gently tosses it towards the basket in Soldier's hands.

Soldier drops the basket, pulls a knife and skewers the turnip in mid-air. His blank, battle-ready expression collapses into confusion as he looks at the root lodged on the end of his KA-BAR.

"That eager to do the chopping, huh," Steve says.

Soldier’s glare has upgraded to Defcon Fuck. He looks like he’s trying to find words but also like most of his faculties are going towards not popping a vein.

The turnip slides off the end of his knife and plops into the basket. Steve smiles sunnily. “See, you’ve got the hang of it,” he says. “Come on, we’ve got to get these out of the ground or they’ll rot.”

Soldier looks very much like he wants to send the knife through Steve’s face next, but he picks up the basket and stalks over to the other side of the patch. He looks at the ground and crouches down like a lawn chair folding up.

Birds chirp. The bees hum. Soldier excavates turnips and carrots and garlic out of the vegetable patch, first like they’re armed landmines, then like they’re dead mice. When sweat starts dripping off his nose Steve gets vaguely concerned about heatstroke and decides an intervention might be the Christian thing to do. Natasha used to run herself ragged and needed prompting before she finally figured out how to regulate things like food and water. “You can go cool off in the basin if you like,” Steve says. “In the greenhouse. Should be full by now. I’ve been using it as a wading pool.”

Soldier gives him a look of vicious disdain through damp strings of hair. “Or not,” Steve says mildly. “You finish up here, I’ll go make us some lemonade.”

Soldier jerks out another carrot and flings it onto the pile. Steve leaves him to it.

Once inside, he’s got a new set of challenges. He takes a few lemons out of the icebox and gives them a considering look. “Can’t be that hard,” he says aloud.

It’s harder. Steve ends up mangling about six lemons in increasingly tragic ways, hoping against hope that one of them will produce juice. They don’t. After fifteen minutes he gives up, puts down the potato masher and texts Sam.

**Flappy Bird:** Dude. It’s water and lemon and sugar. It’s three things. And like two steps.

**Flappy Bird:** Why didn’t you just google this?

**cobra commander:** google is more judgemental than you are

**cobra commander** : also we don’t have wifi

**Flappy Bird** : I find both of those things hard to believe.

**cobra commander** : it’s west virginia, sam. not the avengers tower

**Flappy Bird** : You can’t just keep saying “this isn’t the avengers tower” about everything like it’s a legit excuse for your laziness, dude. Call cox services and fix your damn wifi already.

**cobra commander** : we don’t have wifi and we don’t need wifi.

**cobra commander:** i live on a mountain, sam.

**cobra commander:** west virginia took me home.

**Flappy Bird:** White man don’t lie to me. I see your Baby Ballroom on my Netflix.

So that doesn’t pan out. Also, Natasha needs to use her own damn Netflix account.

Desperately, Steve consults the rickety shelves of books by the fireplace. He hadn’t examined them too closely when he first arrived on the farm; he’d taken one look at the rustic wallpaper and authentic hobbit-hewn furniture and assumed that all the books would be by John Steinbeck or someone equally unbearable. Now all that means is that the previous owner was definitely the type to have a few ancient print cookbooks lying around somewhere.

Apparently they had a fun nephew or something, because he does find a single cookbook wedged in between a Steinbeck and a Hemingway. He prises it out and stares at the color-splashed cover.

The title reads, in all caps: IDIOT’S GUIDE TO IDIOT COOKING: GROW THE HELL UP ALREADY!

“Sure,” Steve says, and flicks to the table of contents.

He props the book by the cutting board, open to the page entitled “LIFE GIVES YOU LEMONS,” subtitled “LIFE ALSO GAVE YOUR MOTHER AN IDIOT WHO CAN’T MAKE LEMONADE,” and gets to squeezing.

It’s twenty more minutes before he has a pitcher of something that can, by FDA standards, be called lemonade, but it’s cold and it’s potable so it’s going to have to do. Steve ferries it outside and finds Soldier nowhere.

“You thirsty?” Steve calls, deciding banging a fork against the pitcher like he sometimes bangs a fork against a bowl to summon the cats for dinner is too much. Then he catches sight of Soldier facedown in the greenhouse basin.

It’s a big basin. It’s cement, nearly ten feet long, and meant to distribute water through the greenhouse for evaporation. Soldier is floating, unmoving, in the center of the pool.

“Uh,” Steve says.

Soldier doesn’t answer. For one shocked second, Steve is genuinely afraid he has, in the span of less than a day, driven Soldier to the brink, but then Soldier slowly swivels his head to the side and glares at Steve with one waterlogged eye.

“What,” Soldier says, bubbling a little.

“Nothing,” Steve says. “Not a thing.”

“You’re disturbing me.”

“I see that,” Steve says. He looks down at the tray of lemonade. In an effort to make the presentation as obnoxious as possible, he’d unearthed a few paper umbrellas from a dusty drawer and stuck them in. Ragged chunks of lemon swim in the lemonade. He’s helped by the fact that all the glasses in the farmhouse are ancient Disney-themed plastic. Mickey Mouse, scarred by many washings, leers geriatrically from one plastic tumbler.

Steve wavers, considering his options, and then he bends over and places one of the glasses on a flat edge of the basin. “Fluids,” he says. “For when you’re… done.”

Soldier slowly, stiffly rotates in the water without making any discernible arm or leg movements, like a hotdog swiveling in brine.

“...Okay,” Steve says, as Soldier, face up now, floats his way closer with no visible means of propulsion. “I’ll leave you to it. Dinner’s at seven. You can put the glass back in the sink when you’re done.”

“Understood,” Soldier says, fairly civilly. Practically genial by recent standards. Steve has another hysterical moment where he wonders whether or not he should have watered Soldier to equilibrium along with the rest of his vegetables before he turns back to the house.

The lemonade is magnificent. Steve texts a picture of it to Sam. You can achieve anything, Steve reflects, if you have a pioneering spirit.

-o-

The… _man…_ Widow left him with goes to bed at 2135. This is preceded by one hour of cooking and two hours of reading on the porch. Several attempts were made to lure Soldier inside, but they were unsuccessful. Promises of a plate left in the oven will remain unverified. Soldier had made the mistake of drinking the lemonade and his teeth still ache with phantom sweetness. Who knows what the hell will be in the “dinner”.

He has more important things to do. As darkness falls, he climbs down off the barn roof and infiltrates the farmhouse.

He tosses the place top to bottom. The handler has proven to be a depraved maniac and Soldier has to at least know the extent of what he’s dealing with.

There’s a case with two handguns in it by the kitchen door, loaded, but the case itself is covered in dust and locked besides. On top of it are seven beat up paperbacks. The kitchen table has twenty more. The tiny living room is lost to them entirely. The whole damn house has the worst book infestation Soldier has ever seen.

He goes to the “guest room” the Steve had prepared for him. It’s small, the bed neatly made, the place as clean-looking as can be when there’s so much floral wallpaper. Soldier can’t find a single camera or listening device even though he scours the place twice. He even unscrews the lightswitch panel with the tip of his knife, and discovers no more than prehistoric wiring and the mummified corpse of some kind of bug. Soldier grimaces and replaces the panel.

There’s an attic, dusty and full of boxes, and a cellar, mostly empty save for a handful of lumpy pickled shapes in jars. The kitchen is clean and well stocked, the floor tiled and making no sound under Soldier’s boots. The icebox has a lot of yogurt, along with no less than seven containers labeled some version of _probiotic_. One kitchen cabinet seems to be entirely full of pills. One of the shelves has a folded up sling, a leg brace and some rib strapping.

He investigates further. In a kitchen drawer is a motorcycle license, Steven Grant Rogers, a library card, Steven Grant Rogers, credit card, debit card, Steve Grant goddamn Rogers.

There’s also a SHIELD badge. _COMMANDER STEVEN G. ROGERS,_ says the ID tag on the back.

SHIELD.

Widow works for SHIELD. But. This whole situation makes no fucking sense. If this… _Steve…_ is a SHIELD commander, then why the hell is he sitting out here like some kind of hermit? What is he _doing_ out here? Is he some kind of sleeper agent. Widow treated him like a civilian, but then said he was an operative. He sure as hell doesn’t move like one, even injured. That SHIELD badge was tossed in the drawer like it belonged with the broken ballpoints and rubber band ball. How long has he been exiled out here.

How long is _he_ going to be out here. Soldier knows the right thing to do and it’s kill this captain, steal the truck and come back in. He needs to return to the vault and report. Admit to his failure and submit to recalibration. But underestimating Widow is lethal, and he has no idea what precautions she’s taken to keep him here. He needs to determine what kind of prison this is before he can make a plan to get out of it. He is of no use dead.

Widow said he would disappear here.

Soldier ghosts upstairs. It takes a lot more fucking work than usual, because these stairs are 10% wood to 90% creak. At least his fatigues have long since dried from the water basin.

Commander Steven G. Rogers sleeps with his door open, every window flung wide and a fan droning in the corner that drowns out a whole host of minor noises. Half Soldier’s instincts yell _trap_ and the other half yell _dumbass._ Fucking Steve is hardly covered by the thin sheet, bunched as it is around one knee and thigh. He’s in shorts and another damn white A-frame, thick surgical scars stretching across his chest and up his right shoulder and down his right leg.

Around his throat are a set of dogtags.

One of them is face up on his chest, in a lucky stroke, and limned silver in the moonlight. CAPTAIN STEVEN G ROGERS 37337566 T42 43  C.

Captain. That’s right. It sounds right. Commander’s wrong and Fucking _Steve_ is also. Commanders don’t partake in hazing, but Soldier’s met plenty of captains with the gravitas of a bored two year old in church. The lackadaisical irreverence and the - the _cow touching_ are definitely captain behavior. And like hell is Soldier going to call him _Steve._

He’s recognized today for what it was, finally. He’s been on enough STRIKE teams to know that there is no excuse for catching it sooner, but in his defense, he usually _was_ the hazing.

Has Widow placed him here as some sort of test.

He goes outside. The barn continues to smell like a locker room for animals. The horrible lumpy cow blarts at him from its stall, as if he would deign to acknowledge it. He climbs up to check the second story of the barn. It’s full of hay. As he watches, two, four, seven sets of reflective green eyes blink open and stare at him from the far end. One of them meows. Soldier bares his teeth at it and drops back down to ground level.

It’s hard to find the edge of the property. He circles, giving the bee field a wide berth. The greenhouse is a riot of escaped plants, wound around everything and poking out through the holes in the glass, nothing but a small cleared area left around the basinlike trough. Behind the barn there is indeed an outhouse, and it does have some kind of metal box bolted to the wall. There is also, however, the promised nest of spiders.

Soldier is not afraid of spiders. And he has a metal arm specifically to handle dangerous or toxic substances. Like spiders.

He decides it is not necessary to open the box at this point in time.

He continues his survey. The back of the property becomes forest, and he’s wary of coming up on an invisible boundary without any clear idea of what defensive measures might be in play so he stops before he gets too deep and heads the other way. Past the front yard there’s the decrepit truck which must be Captain’s, and beyond that the overgrown lane that leads out to the road. He steps right to the edge of the gravel driveway. There’s no hum of anything, no laser grid or otherwise, so either it’s not active unless some kind of sensor is tripped or Captain was lying. Soldier has no way to tell. There’s a strange little conviction that says Captain hasn’t lied yet, but Soldier disregards that as unreliable perceptory malfunction.

He edges further. Still nothing. But maybe it doesn’t stop anything from going out, only coming in. He creeps all the way down the drive, where the gravel becomes slightly more well-paved road; nothing happens. Some poking at what is presumably the property edge reveals a wooden mailbox, bleached with age and almost entirely subsumed by the vines grown around it. If there was ever a house number on it, it’s long been eaten away by time and rain.

Soldier picks up a rock from the ground and gently tosses it onto the cracked pavement. Nothing. Another six rocks tossed with varying velocities produce the same result. It must be a biologically activated grid. He doesn’t have the resources to test it further. The only logical thing to do is retreat.

Soldier circles the house and barn twice more. The night continues to be utterly lacking in any threat or conflict, save for what sounds like all-out insect warfare in the bushes. At one point Soldier sees a dark shape move in the corner of his eye and whirls, but it’s just a cat jumping onto the porch and it meows at him reproachfully before slinking away. Soldier’s left standing in the clearing between the barn and the house and the truck, panting over nothing at all.

Captain issued no directives. He has set no standards of behavior. Neither has Widow, beyond _stay here._ There’s nothing here to _do._

Soldier spends the rest of the night circling the property with an itch growing under every square centimeter of skin. His body is starting to ache, worse than it did before Captain filled the basin and gave him leave to get in. Suggested. Suggested he get in. This Captain is no kind of handler. He’s just a - a custodian. A janitor for this safehouse. Soldier has to remember that. He just has to get through this, just like everything before. Widow will come back. He can deal with this until then.

And if Captain _does_ get an order to put a bullet in Soldier’s head, he’s going to find out just how difficult _that_ is. Soldier has no intention of letting down his guard.

-o-

Of course, by next morning he has a fever. Captain, amazingly, does not fail to notice. “You feeling alright?” he asks, pausing in the doorway.

“ _Fine,”_ Soldier snaps, undermined by the seditious way his teeth are chattering.

“Alright,” Captain allows. “But I gotta warn you, I don’t really have a choice about using the facilities in here.”

Soldier’s in the bathtub, because it’s the most defensible area and it’s got access to potable water. It’s also in the only bathroom in the house. “Just d-do it,” he growls, pushing further into the corner to stop his metal arm from clattering against the tub.

Captain limps in, washes his hands, brushes his teeth, washes his face, examines the scarring on his cheek and jaw, rubs an ointment onto his thigh and hip and shoulder, and fastidiously draws the shower curtain around the tub before using the toilet. Soldier fights the sagging of his eyelids. The shower curtain has little yellow ducks printed on it. They’re starting to tango.

At some point Captain must have left, but then come back, because Soldier hears his voice nearby, not far but not within striking distance. “Damn it, Natasha,” Captain says indistinctly. “Is he coming off something?”

Widow’s voice is even more indistinct, but she sounds interested. “Is he?”

“It sure as hell looks like it.” Captain just sounds sour. “If he needs anything, I’m calling you for an airlift.”

“He’ll be fine. Just drown him in chicken soup like you did to me all those times.”

“If he doesn’t improve by sundown -”

“I’m your first call, yes. Make sure of it. I highly doubt any hospital visit is going to result in anything but casualties. Pretty sure I’ve detoxed off the same stuff he’s on, too, and I did it without his enhancements. He’s tough. He’ll be fine.”

There’s a beep, and the next noise Captain lets out is a long sigh. Soldier wonders if he can operate the water taps with his boot. His skin feels like it’s become the battleground for two separate warring armies of fire ants. Maybe he’ll drown.

The next second Captain is there again, looming over him like a rugged pink monolith. “Let’s get you to bed, hotshot,” he says, reaching down, then jerks his hand back with a low hiss when Soldier automatically blocks it.

He comes right back, though, and this time he catches Soldier’s metal arm. The pressure sensors aren’t the most sensitive, but Soldier can tell his grip is strong, stronger than it should be. “You need to lie down,” Captain says. “You’ll be more comfortable in a bed.”

_“No,”_ Soldier says, on principle. The fire ants have started using artillery and the tub is at least marginally cooler than the air.

“No? What’s wrong with the bed?”

Soldier can’t believe Captain’s stupid enough that he doesn’t even notice the fire ants. He expounds upon this at length, then realizes that for some reason his mouth isn’t moving. “Glrghrh,”’ he complains.

“Right,” Captain says. “That’s what I hate about beds too, the glrghh. You comfortable here?”

Soldier, now under joint force fire ant carpet bombing, tries to tell Captain to go fuck himself. Captain does not seem to receive the sentiment. Maybe he’s in league with the fire ants. “You wanna go lie down in the water again, champ?”

The water. Soldier tries to focus on whichever of the three swimming Captains is the right one. His bones hurt. He’s so tired. He has no idea what Captain offered but it can’t be worse than this. “Yes,” he manages, with heroic effort.

Captain stands up, leans over and lifts Soldier out of the bathtub with a grunt of effort. Soldier tries to make him stop, but Captain just grunts again and carries him out of the bathroom. Soldier tires of elbowing him pretty quickly, and then he can’t remember what he was doing or why so he just hangs there and jolts as Captain lurches down some stairs.

Soldier’s eyes open again when he gets deposited on - concrete. Trees overhead. Sunlight. The greenhouse basin. It’s dry now, but an arm reaches over Soldier’s head and there’s the squeak of a tap and then the splatter of water. It starts to seep into his fatigues as the level steadily rises and the armies of fire ants are driven off by external intervention. Somewhere far away his boots are being pried off. Maybe Captain isn’t in on the fire ants’ side after all. Soldier closes his eyes.

At some point he’s lifted again, or at least his head is. What feels like a rolled up towel is placed under his head. “So you don’t drown,” Captain says somewhere. Then, “Bradbury or Wodehouse, buddy?” Then, “Wodehouse it is. Let’s see... Here we are. _If Jeeves had been there, he would have been able to tell me exactly how to rifle through a fellow’s belongings with minimal disturbance and maximal efficiency, but he wasn’t there, which was rather to the point as it was in Jeeves’s bedroom that I was doing said rifling…”_

The deep, even voice is familiar. The water is cool, and the formicidaeal ceasefire seems to be holding. He can feel the air move and sunlight and shadow dapple over his face. He must have fallen into a river. A river where someone is telling him a story. Maybe he died.

That theory gets disproven eventually, because the water revokes its past alliances and turns on him, heating up. The light grows until it’s too bright even through his closed eyes, and moving his head feels like trying to haul cement using only his eyebrow muscles. Being dead can’t be this fucking uncomfortable.

Then a hand covers his eyes, hot but dark, and then, a wet cool piece of cloth. Relief. “Let’s get you out of the sun,” the big voice says, and he gets lifted up again.

Whatever he’s laid down on is soft, but they’re still outside, the feeble breeze blowing over his skin. Exposed.

Reality filters in slowly. This period of debilitating weakness is when the retrieval teams come. He knows this. It’s why the post-mission comedown is so bad, so ruinous: he goes long enough without checking in, he’s got to be weak enough for them to force the issue. Any minute now it’ll be the tranq darts and the mag cuffs and then the tank.

But it just keeps on not happening. It just keeps on being the shade and the cool breeze and the big voice, and the sound of birds and frogs and bugs in the trees. He can’t help but drift again, even out of the water. Someone is close by, someone he knows, and that’s - protection. Someone’s sitting sentry. Someone who won’t falter or leave or fall asleep. He’s telling Soldier a story.

At one point something sniffs at his ear, then butts his face, then climbs onto his chest. Soldier remembers that he has eyes, then tries to open them, then remembers about the wet handkerchief. The weight on his chest settles in and then starts to knead his stomach.

“Be nice to him,” Captain’s voice says. “He’s going through some stuff.”

The thing now crouched on Soldier’s chest meows in response.

“That’s Froggy. He’s an unnatural invert who loves water.”

_Meow._

_“_ Yes, I’m talking about you.”

_Mrrrrow._

_“_ You’re an outcast from your race and a perversion of nature.”

_Prrrrrrrrrrr._

“That’s what I thought.”

-o-

True to Natasha’s word, Soldier’s fever breaks somewhere near midnight. Steve lets him sleep out on the porch, bringing some of his own blankets out to make himself a slightly more padded seat on the porch swing. He figures the guest room mattress he dragged out for Soldier will dry alright, and in the meantime the kid’s unstiffened somewhat and started breathing in passably normal sleep.

Steve sits up until dawn, reading about Jeeves on his phone and eventually just staring out at the gradually lightening yard. He gets up every forty minutes or so to check the kid’s pulse and temperature, which both get steadier as time goes on; whatever enhancements he’s got are working.

It’s a good thing too. If this kid is anything like Natasha, taking him to a hospital will just make him disappear for thirteen days to do whatever Frankenstein first aid he decides is appropriate. That had been a fun couple of weeks. Fury had almost authorized the covert ops version of an AMBER alert by the time Natasha resurfaced in Steve’s kitchen, showing off the artisanal stitching and charmingly homemade cast on her leg and eating Steve’s potato salad with a serving spoon. She’d done a pretty good job, but Steve had enrolled the two of them in paramedic night classes anyway.

He doubts he can do anything like that with Soldier, but at the very least he’s going to bully the kid into drinking eight cups of water and getting some electrolytes. Steve ought to make some lemonade again.

And maybe look into resurrecting the “hide a multivitamin in every possible snack food” strategy he ended up having to use with Natasha. Under that jumpsuit Soldier definitely does not look like he gets enough - well, anything in his diet. When Steve unbuttoned the top to loosen his clothing and wipe away some sweat he saw the metal arm goes all the way up to the shoulder, and judging by the scarring it’s not meant to be removable. On a second pass Steve undoes the laces of Soldier’s boots, but after finding three knives in there he decides to leave it at loosening them.

Soldier sleeps well into the morning. Steve shifts himself around eight thirty, because the cats need feeding and he himself is still on a medication schedule. When Froggy - by far the friendliest of the semiferals - comes trotting out of the barn to do the whine & twine on Steve’s ankles, he levers himself up and goes to make breakfast where he can keep an eye on Soldier from the kitchen window.

Somewhere around eleven Soldier sits upright on the porch like a vampire lurching up in a coffin. He looks around creakily, seems to realize he’s in the same place he was before, and starts checking himself all over for weapons, both obviously and in the more discreet way Natasha has, subtly shifting in place. Apparently satisfied, he starts clumsily tying up his boots.

Steve finishes stirring yogurt into his muesli, picks up the breakfast tray and heads outside. “Morning, champ,” he calls, opening the front door with his foot. “You up for some breakfast?”

Soldier gives Steve a look of watery spite and doesn’t answer. “Good to see you’re feeling better,” Steve says, putting the tray on the porch swing in arm’s reach of Soldier.  

Soldier stares balefully at the toast. Steve picks up a slice, butters it, sprinkles on some cinnamon and sugar and hands it to him. Soldier visibly debates the moral consequences of taking it.

“Eat,” Steve says. “I hear it’s good for you.”

Soldier wavers, gives in and takes the toast. After a minute, he bites into it like he wishes it had a jugular he could sever.

Steve sits down on the porch steps to finish his muesli and sip his tea, looking out at the garden. He should probably pick through the tangle of vines around the greenhouse and remove any broken glass. He himself doesn’t go over there much, but Soldier seems the type to stick himself through any crawlspace in a mile radius just to check that he can fit. The porch could probably stand to be painted too. Steve’s seen splinters out here the size of his thumb.

Soldier, having grimly overcome two slices of toast, evaluates the remaining mug of tea. He eventually decides it’s nontoxic, which is a stroke of luck because Steve’s next step would’ve been trying to enforce hydration via Gatorade popsicles. The guy doesn’t seem any happier for having eaten breakfast, though; Steve’s aware of him in his peripheral vision and if anything he seems to be winding himself tighter, looking out at the yard just like Steve is, only with a fraction of the benevolence.

Steve makes sure his next sip of tea is more of a slurp. So is the next one. And the next. “What the _fuck is this place,”_ Soldier finally bursts out, like a pressure cooker finally popping its lid.

Steve looks over at him. “How do you mean?”

Soldier makes a sharp, jerky gesture that’s probably meant to encompass everything from the three tabby cats sunning themselves in front of the barn to the grass stains on the knees of Steve’s jeans. “What do you _do_ here,” he says angrily, with a certain shrillness that once again has Steve clocking him as someone younger than he looks and a lot more upset than he’s letting on. Not that it’s any great secret here. Natasha had been a little more contained when it had been her, but the aura of whacked beehive is still very much present.

Also, the toast crumbs around his mouth kind of take away from the glower. Steve heaves a sigh as he extends his leg all the way. “This and that,” he says. “Read. Mind the animals. Eat. Take naps.”

“That’s _all?”_

“I’m on medical leave, champ.”

“What _for.”_

“An alien whale fell on me,” Steve says mildly.

Soldier chews on that one for a few seconds. “The Battle of Manhattan,” he says, but more uncertainly than most people do, and with an odd, pinched look around his eyes.

“Yep,” Steve says. “Broke every single bone in my body.”

That snaps Soldier out of whatever’s got him staring at nothing. “No you didn’t.”

“Yep. Even the tiny little ear ones.”

“You didn’t!”

“All of them. Every single one.”

“No you _didn’t_ ,” Soldier says mulishly. “If you did you’d be _dead.”_

“Well, the serum helped with that a little,” Steve says musingly, scratching his stomach. “Gave me three extra bones, for one.”

_“No.”_

“Broke those too.”

_“What_ bones!”

“Told you. All of em.”

“You didn’t grow new ones. You’re lying. Where are they?”

“You trying to violate my medical privacy?” Steve says, jokingly, but Soldier’s face screws up like there are some fundamental words he doesn’t understand in that sentence. “How about,” Steve says, “if you can guess where they are, I’ll show you.”

“Why should I care about your fucking bones,” Soldier says sullenly, turning up his shoulder at Steve.

“Don’t let the staff of every medical research department on the East coast could hear you say that,” Steve says, mostly to himself. He downs the last of his tea. “Well, if you’re bored - we’d better find something to do.”

Soldier immediately goes wary, like a cat that’s just spotted a vacuum cleaner. “Like what.”

“You ever gone fishing?"

Soldier gives one shake of the head. Steve looks him over consideringly, scratches his chin - he really needs to shave one of these days - and says, "Well, I think my old waders will fit you just fine."

-o-

**_x3642bq9863z29:_ ** _IMG.34_

**_x3642bq9863z29:_ ** _IMG.35_

**_x3642bq9863z29:_ ** _IMG.36_

**_x3642bq9863z29:_ ** _IMG.37_

**_x3642bq9863z29:_ ** _IMG.38_

**_P3849s:_ ** _does steve know you’re taking surveillance photos of him_

**_x3642bq9863z29:_ ** _is his judgment sound_

**_P3849s:_ ** _i trust him with my life_

**_P3849s:_ ** _why do you ask_

**_X3642bq9863z29:_ ** _identify equipment “waders”_

**_x3642bq9863z29:_ ** _relevant mission code “fishing”_

**_P3849s is typing_ **

**_P3849s is typing_ **

**_P3849s is typing_ **

**_P3849s:_ ** _steve will tell you_

**_P3849s:_ ** _don’t worry it’ll be fun :)_

-o-

Natasha calls as he’s getting in the truck. “How’s he doing?” she asks by way of greeting.

“Spectacular,” Steve says. “What’s he been telling you?”

“That you’re a deranged pervert who touches animals inappropriately and that you’re planning to drown him in a swamp.”

“Sounds about right,” Steve says, fastening his seatbelt.

“Let me guess. You milked the cow and want to take him fishing?”

“Yep. And I told him I already have old waders, so now I’ve gotta run to the store and buy some and make them look authentically used.”

“You’re having too much fun out there,” Natasha accuses over the sound of the truck starting.

“It’s West Virginia, Nat. Gotta get my kicks somehow.”

“If he leaves with more trauma than he arrived with it kind of defeats the purpose.”

“But this is the good kind. It’s character-building.”

“If I turn on the news tomorrow and see headlines about a murder-suicide swamp drowning, I’ll be very upset.”

“I don’t think we get the news around here,” Steve says as he pulls out of what could generously be called a dirt driveway. He waits until the truck’s clattered safely onto the road to continue, “Could’ve sworn last week I saw a bumper sticker that said ‘I eat reporters’.”

“Charming,” Natasha says.

“And maybe even true, given what I’ve seen people around here eat,” Steve says.

“You’re such a baby. ‘Ooh, people eat crocodile. Ooh, is that _lizard?_ ’”

“That’s not even what I sound like,” Steve says patiently. “And I don’t know if West Virginia has any crocodiles.”

“If you find one you can throw a barbeque for your neighbors.”

“I don’t think West Virginia has neighbors either.”

“Baby,” Natasha says. “Keep bullying him some more. If he hasn’t killed you yet, it’s probably helping.”

“What the hell am I supposed to be doing with him again?” Steve says, but Natasha just laughs at him and hangs up.

Steve sighs and drops the phone into a cupholder.

One shopping trip later, he’s hauling two pairs of waders out of the passenger seat. He carries them out to the dirt patch by the barn and starts whacking them with his cane to give them the “grandpappy’s first waders” look. After five minutes of this, they look like they've gone through the war. Every war.

Then Soldier catches him doing it. Steve startles mid-whack and they stare at each other. "Just breaking 'em in for you," Steve says. “You know. Getting all the spiders out.”

Soldier’s face spasms.

“We don't get the venomous kind 'round here,” Steve fabricates wildly. “So I wouldn't worry if I can't chase 'em all out.”

Soldier closes his eyes very briefly. When he opens them Steve sees fire. Steve allows his grin to widen manically. “Oh, hey,” he says, leaving off with the waders to go back to the truck. “Bought you these, too.” Steve presents the four knives he bought at the tackle shop. “So you can stop stealing my kitchen knives.”

Soldier looks suitably caught off guard by being presented with weapons, or possibly he thinks Steve’s been too dim to notice the kitchen set dematerializing. He extends a hand towards them warily, but then pauses to look at Steve.

“No spiders,” Steve promises.

Soldier snatches the knives, giving Steve a dirty look. “I’m not afraid of _spiders.”_

“Ooh, don’t let Natasha hear you say that,” Steve says. Then he listens to himself, and frowns sourly. Natasha was right; he _does_ sound like that.

They go fish.

Steve drives them out to the river a couple miles away, laying out a blanket on the riverbank and arranging things as best he can remember from movie scenes of people fishing. The waders are pretty straightforward; Steve pulls them on like pants and everything seems to be functioning as intended.

Soldier puts on the waders with the air of a man lowering himself into radioactive sewage. Steve whistles between his teeth as he sets up the poles, idly wondering how long he can keep this Old MacDonald charade going. He figures he'll know when Soldier snaps and tackles him into the mud.

In the meantime, Steve’s gonna see if he’s still got the knack of falling asleep sitting up.

They make it thirty minutes with not a twitch on the lines before Soldier throws the rod down, shoves off the ground and stomps into the river. He stops a few yards away from the bank and just stands there, probably trying to decide whether drowning himself is a better bet than spending any further seconds with Steve. Then he draws a knife.

“Hang on,” Steve says, as Soldier bends over and hovers with his knifepoint poised perpendicular to the surface of the water. “That’s not gonna - ”

Soldier’s knife blurs, and suddenly there’s a fish on the end of it.

Steve stares. Soldier stares back. The fish wriggles, furiously.

“That’s… one way to do it,” Steve says slowly. “Good... job.”

Soldier’s glare slowly dissolves into smugness. It's a nice look on him. Shame Steve never learned how to quit while he's ahead. “You ever gut one before?”

What follows would probably qualify as B-roll footage for one those horror movies Sam watches full of chainsaws and machetes and inexplicable hockey masks. By the time Soldier wipes his knife on his thigh, the fish has been not so much gutted as aerosolized. Steve stares at it, mildly nauseated and glad the waders come up over his hips. There’s a bit of a splash zone.

“Guess we’re having something else for dinner,” Steve says.

Soldier looks even more smug, like he's accomplished exactly what he set out to do. Since Steve's just decided they're never trying fishing again, he guesses Soldier did.

-o-

In absence of missions, the thing to do is train. But in this hellforsaken bug pit there’s _literally nothing to do,_ and there’s only so many pushups Soldier can grind out before he wants to feed himself feet first into a woodchipper. _Captain_ does things, technically, but everything he does is categorically unacceptable. Yesterday he said something about “helping him turn the compost”. Soldier is starting to miss his cryo chamber.

Especially in this _heat._ Birds chirp. Bees drone. Soldier kicks vengefully at a tree. He feels like he’s gonna _liquefy._ He sits down at the base of the trunk, draws a knife and starts vengefully chipping slivers out of the bark.

“Aw, hey, don’t do that to the tree,” Captain says, when he’s wandered back out of the house and unerringly zoned in to bother Soldier. “It hasn’t done anything to you. Its bark is like its skin.”

“I don’t _care,”_ Soldier growls, stabbing harder.

Captain is unmoved. “Don’t do it to a live one, at least. Come on, up. If you want to make mulch there’s a log pile behind the barn.”

Soldier doesn’t make mulch, but he does accept Captain’s offer of an upgrade to an axe and spends a sublime twenty minutes hacking savagely at logs until he grows bored and his flesh arm tires. Captain stays the entire time, pressed close to the barn wall well out of the way, and when Soldier finally chucks the axe blade-first into the ground Captain dares to edge closer. They observe the blast radius of obliterated log bits. It looks like Soldier stuck a stick of dynamite into the log pile and blew it up **.**

“Guess some of it’s still salvageable for firewood,” Captain says slowly.

Soldier grunts, and then sneezes. A shower of wood dust and shavings falls out of his hair.

“Maybe for a bonfire,” Captain amends, toeing at a small, uneven chunk of wood. “Or, hm.” He bends over creakily and picks up the chunk.

“What are you doing,” Soldier says, immediately suspicious. He’s vindicated when Captain draws a knife from his pocket, even if it is a pathetic little folding knife Soldier wouldn’t use to pick his teeth with.

Captain says, “We’re going to learn whittling. It’s like making art with knives.”

“I know what _whittling_ is,” Soldier says scathingly.

“Great. You won’t have any problem showing me your best technique, then.”

Soldier gestures wildly at the wood explosion.

Captain sighs, and _actually puts his hands on his hips._ It’s an awkward look with a knife and a chunk of log in hand. “C’mon,” he says. “Let’s get ourselves somewhere we can sit.”

Soldier contemplates the axe jutting out from the grass again, but eventually he turns and follows Captain back to the front of the barn.

Captain disappears inside, and returns dragging an attractively rough-hewn bench made out of thick cuts of some sort of polished dark wood. Soldier glares at it speechlessly as Captain lowers himself.

“Did you make that,” Soldier says.

“Naw,” Captain says, stretching his leg out in front of him. “Well, I mean, I helped Old Joe down in the sticks pick out the wood, but that don’t count for much when he did all the carving.”

“Did he teach you all he knows,” Soldier says sardonically.

“Yee-up,” Steve says. He pats the bench. “Now sit so I can teach you too.”

After fifteen minutes Captain has produced something that can, if held to the light and turned just so, be understood as a face. Under any other circumstances, it looks like a fucking potato. Soldier says so. “It looks like a fucking potato,” he says.

“Well, my hands aren’t what they used to be,” Captain says.

“Did they used to be fucking rocks?”

“Beauty in art is subjective,” Captain says blandly, switching tracks so fast Soldier has to physically bite down on the impulse to let loose an ululating baboon shriek in Captain’s face. “What’d _you_ make, then?” Captain says.

Soldier’s hands spasm around his own chunk of wood. For a second Soldier wants to throw it far away, or stomp it into the dirt, or just fucking eat it. But he has the inevitable feeling that Captain will just retrieve it, or dig it out, or make him fucking cough it up just so he can hold it up and say something horrifying like _my god, we need to telephone the Louvre._ Slowly, unwillingly, Soldier pries his fingers open one by one from around the wood.

Captain and Soldier share a devastating silence.

“A knife,” Captain says finally. There’s a quiver of something in his voice. “You whittled your own knife.”

Soldier’s definitely going to throw it now. “You even carved in the little Gerber logo,” Captain continues in tones of pure wonder. “It’s got the little mountain.”

Soldier, already feeling baboonish, finally devolves those last two hundred million years. “Shut up,” he hisses. “Just shut up. You said it yourself. _Beauty. Is. Subjective.”_

Captain makes a noise like a hamster caught in the garbage disposal. Soldier flings the knife - it lands quivering, point first, in the dirt, because he’d balanced it perfectly - and exits the situation.

From the roof of the barn, he watches Captain laboriously crouch down and pull his wooden knife out of the dirt. It looks like it takes more effort than it should, even for him, but then - he pulls it out.

It’s got a turnip stuck on the end of it.

Soldier can’t hold back the gargle of rage. _This whole fucking farm is out to get him._

-o-

When he enters the barn later, after dark, he’s stopped by a covered plate on the polished wooden bench. He lifts the cover. The smell of roast turnip wafts out, along with tomatoes and mustard and beef.

There is also a note, on a folded piece of what looks like sketchbook paper. _To commemorate your first kill,_ the note says, in atrocious handwriting that somehow looks exactly as expected, and below that is a cheery little smiley face and a doodle of a turnip.

Soldier hurls the plate like a discus into the orchard and listens with vile satisfaction to the distant smash.

-o-

He’s in the farmhouse again. He can’t imagine why he’s back in the heart of the Captain’s lair, but he needs to go back out to the barn. He tries to find the kitchen door, but the layout has changed. The paint is still peeling and the floor is still dusty and chipped but he doesn’t recognize anything. He opens a door at random. Behind it is the Captain wearing red white and blue overalls and holding up a platter of turnips.  

“Pigs in a blanket?” Captain says hopefully.

Soldier slams the door in his face and runs. He wrenches open another door. “Tater tots?” Slam. Soldier flees. “Corn and slaw?” Slam. “Mush like mama made it,” Captain drones, and Soldier runs down the endless hallways. He dives for the stairs.

In the kitchen is a whole spread of cat food. The figure at the stove turns around. It’s Bessie. She lows. Milk starts seeping out of the floorboards.

“Want a sip?” Captain says from behind him. Soldier turns. As he watches, Captain grins like a hyena and dissolves into the rising white froth.

Soldier gasps awake. He’s no stranger to nightmares, but this - this is like being trapped in a Norman Rockwell painting done by Hieronymus Bosch. He’s in overalled, mudspattered, haystrewn hell. This place isn’t a safehouse. Widow just didn’t want to risk a neutralization attempt head-on and so brought him here to die of “natural causes”. He’s sure of it. This place is _cursed._

Something _mrrps_ in the darkness. A second later a small fluffy thing rubs against his thigh. Soldier has to lock every muscle so as not to jump a mile. A second later it’s wormed into his lap and settled there, purring like it thinks he’s got food to give or something.

The mundane little lump vibrating happily on his thighs does bring him back to reality somewhat. So he had a bad dream. He’s the Winter fucking Soldier. He is the darkness. He is the curse. He will _not_ be vanquished by _turnips._

-o-

The next morning, Steve finds an exquisitely crafted little figure of a man pinned to the inside of the front door, made up of twigs and twine and carved wood and plaited straw. A matchstick tied to one stiff arm can only be a cane. It’s pinned to the door by means of a knife through the head.

Steve takes a picture and sends it to Natasha.

**chiburashka:** wow

**chiburashka:** that’s really well done

**cobra commander:** i know. kid’s got talent

**cobra commander:** remember when you used to embroider death threats on my pillows

**chiburashka:** hahaha oh man good times

**cobra commander:** do they teach embroidery and voodoo at assassin school

**chiburashka: [** crylaugh crylaugh crylaugh **]**

**chiburashka:** nah the perfectionism just gets applied kind of broad spectrum

**cobra commander:** well this kind of creativity deserves to be rewarded

Steve finds some string, makes a loop and hangs up the little effigy on the porch like a windchime. “Finally, some atmosphere around here,” he says, and snaps another photo for Natasha.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some contemporary homophobic language of the uninspired variety in this chapter ("fag/faggot, dyke".)
> 
> A BIG SPARKLING THANK YOU TO QUIETNIGHT FOR THE PROOFREADING WHICH IMPROVES THIS WORK 100084838488374% AS ALWAYS
> 
> note from Q: Art has arrived!!! BETTER LATE ETC

Day seventeen.

Everything is too fucking hot. On the porch, Soldier’s death threat spins merrily in the breeze. Captain took a _picture_ of it. Like he’s _proud._ Like Soldier made a _good_ thing.

Captain has not for one second stopped his hazing, nor stopped swanning around being upsettingly large in pathetically small A-frames. Soldier feels like a wet sock trapped in an oven. He has spent weeks camped in snowbanks more excruciating than this. His spirit has broken, he decides. There is nothing left for him but to lie in the straw and wait for death, however it will come.

There’s some familiar uneven footsteps, then some rustling, as of someone limping through straw. Soldier grits his teeth and wills himself to dissolve deeper into the haypile at the back of the barn. There’s death and then there’s _this._

“Hey there,” Captain says, his face appearing in Soldier’s vision upside down. “It’s laundry day. I understand the concept may be unfamiliar, but the basic premise is, you give me your clothes, and then I wash them -”

_“What?”_

“First I put water on your clothes,” Captain says patiently. “Then I add _soap -”_

 _“I know what washing is,”_ Soldier snarls. “I don’t need it!”

“You’ve sweated all through your jumpsuit,” Captain says in a helpful tone, like he doesn’t fucking know it’s fatigues. “And you swam with it in the basin. And slept in it. And sat on it in dirt. And in straw. And in -”

“I’ll do it myself,” Soldier snaps. Whatever Captain wants from his uniform, he’s not going to get it.

“I’ll get you some soap. You can wear some of my things while it dries,” Captain says cheerfully, his face disappearing from sight.

It turns out that Captain does laundry in a tin tub, outside, and hangs it on the porch to dry. He sits on the porch steps with the more scarred leg stretched out stiff in front of him and washes shirts and socks and dishtowels in the tub, the garden hose by his hip. He seems to be whacking each individual item of clothing against the tub before rinsing it with the hose and hanging it up on the washing line strung up on the porch.

Soldier is gratified to see it is extremely slow going. Captain has hands that look like a couple of ham hocks grew fingers, and he scrubs the cloth slowly because otherwise it’d probably rip. A lot of water slops out of the tub, and it gets on Captain’s forearms and shirt and the thighs of his jeans. Soap foam clings to him and throws tiny rainbows in the sunlight as patches of his clothes go dark and transparent.

Soldier sits back on his heels in the bushes. There would be a certain satisfaction in making Captain wash it for him, but it’s outweighed by the necessity of keeping hold of his own things. Maintaining gear is a personal responsibility.

His pants have started to feel uncomfortably tight. Soldier glances down, then tries to adjust the fabric first to the left, then to the right. The discomfort does not abate in the slightest. Soldier grits his teeth and does not give in to the urge to just rip the pants off himself and figure out the consequences later. They never felt so - so tight _before._ They really must need a wash.

That leaves the question of what to cover himself with while his uniform is out of commission.

Soldier refuses to put on any of Captain’s things. He will not be bought with linen. Nothing will fit him anyway. The Captain is an upsettingly large man and the Soldier is lithe and compact. Being naked is also out of the question, however. He will have to source his own alternative garments.

There’s got to be something available on the property before he resorts to making loincloths out of the untouched guest room bedsheets. He climbs into the attic again, pries open the nearest likely-looking chest and starts rummaging through.

The first chest is just old shoes, but the next is full of clothes. They turn out to be only nightshirts and aprons, but near the bottom is something that unfolds to be a pair of shorts. There’s an elastic waist and leg holes. The fabric is printed all over with big red strawberries.

The camouflage value of these is below zero. But they will cover any vulnerable bits. And while Captain is not right about anything _ever,_ Soldier really should wash his fatigues, given _their_ camouflage value is also approaching zero due to the smell.

He takes them off. Removing his gear takes him longer, as does reconfiguring everything to fit under the strawberry shorts. Some of his knives he has to set aside, along with the lockpicks he’d shaped out of some wire from the barn and hidden in the seams of his fatigues.

He stows those in the barn, up in the hayloft. It’ll be hard for Captain to get up there with his current physical capabilities, which makes Soldier feel better about using it to sleep in. Captain has also finished his washing, all of it hung up to dry; a few minutes later he stumps out of the farmhouse with his blanket under his arm and heads for the bee field.

Captain naps outside more and more lately, which is infuriating to watch - butterflies land on him, and sometimes his fingers curl in and out or his eyes move, and Soldier can _see_ the freckles forming - but will now serve as good cover. He sneaks down, takes the tin tub and fills it up for his own uniform.

Washing cloth, he discovers, is something his hands know how to do. The soap makes his metal hand slippery and he has to be careful not to pull too hard on anything, but after a few cautious scrubs things seem to be working themselves out. He focuses on going over the whole thing inch by inch so no possible thoughts about where and how and when he learned how to launder leak out.

It doesn’t take too long to wash only two items of clothing, so he takes off his boots and washes his socks, then rinses the outside of the boots. He hangs up everything to dry in the barn, high in the loft and away from all of Captain’s items.

Soldier resolutely does not look at the multiple pairs of undershorts strung up on the line. Many of them have extremely unbecoming patterns. No less than four pairs sport the design of the American flag.

Seeing them makes him grit his teeth and turn away for no good reason. He has no national allegiance. He is an asset unencumbered by irrelevancies like patriotism or personal sentiment. That’s the whole _point_ of the - the forgetting things. He doesn’t need them. It makes him a better operative. The best fucking operative in the world.

What else did they make you forget.

He stands in the scrubby grass with his fists clenched, eyes shut, bricking up the thought and all that comes with it. The sun is shining. The bug chorus is full swing in the trees. The breeze feels fresh and cool over his bare back, and the wet grass feels somehow refreshing on his toes. Maybe he doesn’t need to put his boots back on immediately.

It’s a treasonous thought. He’s already significantly compromised his combat readiness by removing his uniform. But. It had to be done. He doesn’t have a spare. This was the sensible course of action.

Of course, that doesn’t mean he can’t be angry about it. He didn’t _choose_ to do this. It’s not his fault he’s been forced into these - these civilian rags. It’s all Captain’s fault. _All of this_ is Captain’s fault.

The shorts are a lot more comfortable than the uniform. That makes him angrier, so he snatches up his knives and stalks off to practice by the bean patch.

Captain shows up on the porch after he’s already thrown and retrieved all his knives twice. “Nice aim,” Captain says.

Soldier grunts and throws the next batch at a tree that’s twice as far away. His aim isn’t _nice_ . His aim is _exceptional_ . His aim is _unparalleled_. He could put a knife through Captain’s throat without even turning around and Captain doesn’t sound even remotely concerned about that possibility.

“Nice shorts,” Captain adds, like an afterthought. “You like strawberries? For eating, I mean.”

Soldier shrugs angrily. How the fuck should he know.

“Ever tried them?”

Soldier sends the next knife into the post by Captain’s head, and Captain, infuriatingly, doesn’t even twitch.

“There’s a blackberry patch in the woods out back,” Captain continues, like he’s just thinking out loud. “But I haven’t seen any strawberries around. I’ll keep an eye out next time I’m in town.”

“Go sit on a cock,” Soldier snaps in Russian.

“Well, I would, but around here there’s a serious shortage,” Captain says in the same language. “At least for recreational purposes. But let me know if you find any,” he adds, and waves amiably as he goes back inside.

Soldier, staring at his retreating back, forgets to throw his knife for a whole minute. Whoever taught Captain Russian needs to be beaten to death with raw beets. His pronunciation wasn’t even that bad, which makes it even worse.

Fuming, Soldier retrieves his knives and starts over again, this time farther away from the house, more in the woods. Angry is good. Angry keeps him focused. If he’s not focused he starts thinking about - things, bad things, and he gets confused. He’s having more nightmares, worse than the one before: that was a funhouse mirror dream, meaningless, not remotely connected to the emotions it was saddled with. But these - these are strange, fractured visions, of Captain wearing things he never wore and saying things he never said. Of Captain leading men, giving orders, striding through battlefields in a garish tricolored uniform. Of Captain stroking his hand down Soldier’s back, like a favorite cat, like a close friend.

And worse - worse are the dreams about himself. Wearing and talking and doing things he never did. Marching with Captain. Eating with him. Turning to Captain and saying - saying -

What else did they make him forget.

In dreams, he has another name.

And it’s starting to bleed into daylight. Strawberries. He does like them. He’s never had one. He has. He knows what it’ll taste like. He’s never eaten one before.

Soldier collects his knives, turns on the greenhouse basin spigot and grimly watches it fill up. Desperate times call for desperate measures. He’s gonna stay in the water until he prunes.

-o-

When Natasha next visits she comes up the drive already dragging her clothes off, unbuttoning her shirt and ungracefully yanking off her jeans in a way that means she hops for a good three feet of garden path around the porch. “You need any help there?” Steve calls, amused, and gets the shirt flung at him for his trouble. Natasha wrestles her boots off with extreme prejudice and when she's down to her skivvies she drops her whole body in the greenhouse trough.

She surfaces a full five seconds later, wiping her hair from her eyes. “If you needed a decontam shower, the garden hose is a better bet,” Steve says mildly, leaning his forearms on the porch rail.

“That car,” Natasha says, pointing one dripping arm vengefully, “has no AC. And you live in the _devil’s asshole_ of humidity.”

“West Virginia,” Steve says reflectively. “Truly a natural paradise.”

“Ha ha,” Natasha says, like she wasn’t the one to stick him out here. “Where’s your roommate?”

Steve points. The upper third of Soldier’s head is just visible over the rise of the barn roof. He’s glaring at them. He’d been spooked up out of the trough by the arrival of Natasha’s car; Steve feels there’s some resentment being channeled there. He waves.

Natasha waves too. “How’re you doing?” she calls.

Soldier pops up, yells _“He won’t show me his bones,”_ then drops back down and disappears.

Natasha looks at where he’s not anymore. Then she looks at Steve.

Steve studies the eaves innocently. “I told him the serum gave me three extra bones.”

“Oh yeah? Which ones?”

“I told him to guess.”

“But you don’t have any extra bones,” Natasha says after a moment, sounding a lot more certain than the situation really calls for.

“Sure,” Steve agrees easily.

Natasha’s eyes narrow in a way that indicates she’s going to steal his latest x-rays and do some counting. “You want to swim too?” Steve offers. “If the trough’s not big enough there’s a watering hole half a mile away.”

“Well sure farmer Steve,” Natasha agrees. She pops up out of the basin with a bright, wide smile and swinging her gosh golly fist. “We’ll go to the watering hole - but let’s all whitewash the fence first!”

“You’re in a greenhouse trough,” Steve says. “You wanna get on my case, go ahead, but you’re in your knickers with your knees over the edge of a trough full of rainwater in my backyard.”

“I can't believe you just said 'knickers’ out loud,” Natasha says. “I think this place is changing you.”

“Is it, though?” Steve says vaguely. Soldier has reappeared at the corner of the barn and resumed glaring at them. Natasha waves at him again, then turns to Steve with a thoughtful look on her face. “Are those strawberries on his… shorts?”

“Yep.”

“And are they, in fact, shorts?”

“Nope.”

“Went shopping, huh.”

“Nope. No idea where he got them.”

“Hm. That’s worrying,” Natasha says, not sounding real worried about it.

“Well, I’ve yet to find any corpses,” Steve says. “I think we’re doing alright.”

“I can _hear you!”_ Soldier yells.

“We know,” Natasha calls back. “How’re you doing?”

Soldier takes this as an invitation to stalk over, looking like a wet cat trying to fluff itself in fury. “This man,” he says, stabbing a finger at Steve, “is a _fraud._ He’s not an operative. He’s not a _commander.”_

“Really?” Natasha says interestedly.

“He,” Soldier says, voice quivering with incense, “is a _farmer.”_ He pronounces it like _pedophile._ “You _left me_ with a _farmer.”_

Natasha surprises everyone by bursting into laughter so hard she falls back in the trough. Soldier twitches as some of the splashback hits his skin. “Farmer Steve!” Natasha hoots. “What’s he - what’s he farm, bricks?” She loses it again.

“I am too a commander,” Steve tells Soldier, not putting a hand over his heart on the basis that it would be too much. “I have a little piece of plastic that says so and everything.”

“Steve’s from _Brooklyn,”_ Natasha gasps. “That cow is _feral._ He got the chickens from the neighbors because they felt sorry for him, and he’s too scared to deal with them without oven mitts on.”

“Chickens are terrorists,” Steve protests. “I don’t negotiate with terrorists.”

“Each of them weighs like five pounds max,” Natasha points out.

 _“You_ weigh five pounds max,” Steve mutters.

Natasha preens, then seems to remember she decided she doesn’t want other people knowing she experiences human emotions. She sits up in the basin. “Their brains are the size of wasabi peas,” she tells him. “Just eat the meanest ones and make the others watch.”

“They’d just be jealous they don’t get a piece,” Steve says grimly. “They’re cannibals. They _eat chicken nuggets.”_

Soldier, who’s been watching this back and forth with an increasingly pressurized look on his face, finally explodes. _“A farmer,”_ he yells, one metal finger pointed accusingly at Steve’s face like he’s decrying him as consort of the devil. “There’s nothing _here!_ I’m _useless! Why did you put me out here!”_

“Would you rather be on missions, Soldier?” Natasha says, in the same voice she used to talk about chickens. “Killing people?”

“I,” Soldier says, his face still angry but his voice not quite there anymore. He suddenly looks more out of place here than ever, even with his fatigues gone, his sleek silver arm throwing off strange curved reflections and his scar-carved body sharp and pale and hostile. “I’m a valuable asset.”

“You are,” Steve says, taking pity on him. It’s - well, not exactly easy to forget, not with how twisted up Soldier is all the time, but when he’s hopping mad and baffled by Steve’s bullshit he feels like just another trainee agent Maria or Sam or Natasha sent to him to break in. But Soldier’s not another Quantico kid or Marine hotshot. He’s like Natasha. And Natasha, in her first few years with people who weren’t mercenaries, criminals and state-sponsored torturers, had been kind of a fucking psychopath.

“You’re a good person,” Steve tells Soldier. “I like having you here. You’ve helped me do a lot of things I couldn’t before. And I never said I was a farmer,” he adds, virtuously.

Soldier stops looking lost and once again returns to the familiar lands of incendiary fury. Steve hasn’t been taking it personally and isn’t about to start, because he’s familiar enough with brain damage - his own and others’ - to know that it can pretty seriously impact mood and emotional regulation. And even without all that, Natasha had pretty obviously plucked this guy out of everything he knew and plopped him down here in the middle of nowhere with Steve. Everything new and strange and incomprehensible here is gonna be solidly understood as Steve’s fault.

“It’s alright, buddy,” Steve says, meaning it. “If you’re feeling cooped up, we’ll go do more things. There’s a couple hikes I’ve been meaning to try, and I was thinking we could clean up the orchard some -”

“That’s _not_ what I’m talking about!”

“Here,” Natasha says, hopping out of the basin and going to her discarded pants. She pulls her phone out of them and offers it to Soldier. “Open google and look at the top news stories.”

Soldier stares at her, chest heaving, then snatches the phone. He holds it close to his face, blocking out the sun glare as he types. His fingers clench tighter and tighter as the page presumably loads - the 3G isn’t fast out here in the mountains - but then his eyes go wide. And wider.

Steve watches Soldier’s face slacken into something like wonder. He looks at Natasha. “Do _I_ need to look at the top news stories?” he says.

She looks back at him. “You haven’t been reading the news.”

“No,” Steve admits. “No TV out here, and I mostly keep the radio on music.” Plus, he’d been told point blank if he didn’t follow his medical regimen to the letter he might permanently compromise the function of his shoulder and leg, especially if his accelerated healing set it wrong again. If he doesn’t rest properly, he’ll only be out of commission longer and waste more resources and time. He’s been trying not to be an idiot about it.

“Keep that up,” Natasha says. “At least for now.”

“Is this real?” Soldier demands. They look at him. There’s a shake to his voice. He’s still staring at the screen. He switches to Russian. “All of this? Real?”

“Yes. It’s not finished,” Natasha says. Steve feels for the kid. Natasha’s probably burned down whatever gulag she pulled him out of; it must be showing up on the news as terrorist activity like it usually does. “The network was widespread. I have work to finish in DC. But: a few more weeks. And then I would like your help in rooting out the rest.”

Soldier stares back at her like a dog on point, a fine tremor over his whole body. “Tell me,” he says. “Tell me how.”

Natasha meets his gaze consideringly. Then she glances at Steve. “Will you give us a moment?” she says. “And some paper and pens, if you have it.”

Steve goes. He digs them out a notebook and some ballpoints, and then, because he knows how to read Natasha’s requests these days, he takes the car keys and jingles them when he comes back out and hands the notebook over. “I’m gonna get us some pie and barbecue,” he tells her. “You need anything Walmart can offer?”

“Not this time,” Natasha says, smiling a little. “But I’ll stay here tonight, if you’ll have me.”

“Always,” Steve says, and visibly startles Soldier by kissing the top of Natasha’s head on the way out to the truck.

The Walmart is forty minutes away, which should give the two of them plenty of time to conspire. Part of Steve does admittedly want to pry and ask Natasha what kind of network she’s scything at in DC, but the rest of him figures, well, she’s handling it. And Steve’s retired.

He’d been kind of anticipating boredom fever, in a not overly concerned way, and then had been pretty surprised when it hadn’t happened. But then he’d really only retired from desk work - he’d looked at his calendar and realized that while he no longer had nine to five hours (or, more realistically, seven to nine) his speaking engagements and charity-going and consultation requests had tripled, sprouting up amongst his new class schedule. He barely had time to complete figure drawing homework, let alone sit and twiddle his thumbs.

And he still saw Natasha and Sam and Maria and everybody pretty regularly, between the training exercises he got asked to run and the standing gym dates none of them bothered to change. Sam’s based out of DC and Natasha’s there as much as she is anywhere, so it’s not like he never saw them anymore either.

Then again, he’d only been two and a half months into “retirement” when he’d been told to suit up and start punching Chitauri, so who knows. Maybe he’d been a week out from dropping all his classes and going vigilante to get his kicks. He doesn’t really feel like he was, but maybe he would’ve surprised himself.

But it’s been pretty nice, not to have to read endless reports and sign off on dockets and listen to interminable briefings on the state of the world today. It’s all important, of course. And someone has to do it. But Steve hasn’t been Captain America for three years and a Commander only goes into the field when shit has gotten quite seriously fucked, which is set up as such for good reason. But Steve was, in a lot of ways, quite literally made for the field, and he’s not about to go knocking any doors down to get back to his desk.

And now he’s in the fields. Haha.

When he gets back it’s full dusk, the light gone blue and the cicadas going full blast in the bushes. The frogs are giving them some stiff competition, so the overall effect is that a witch cursed an orchestra to be trapped forever in the woods with all their instruments turned into whoopie cushions.

Natasha’s on the porch swing, making it creak by means of planting one foot against the porch rail and sawing it back and forth. She’s still in her underthings. Part of Steve can’t help but appreciate the sight even as the rest of him thinks vaguely of mosquito bites and potential porch splinters. “Sure you don’t want some pants?”

Natasha wiggles her toes. “Why would I want that?”

“The interest of not catching whatever the mosquitoes are carrying these days?”

“I’m a super assassin. I’ve been stuck with every vaccine ever made. Mosquitoes die on contact.”

“Sure. Just don’t come running to me for malaria tablets,” Steve says, putting down his bags on the bench next to her. “Because I don’t have any. Where’s our friend?”

Natasha unerringly sniffs out the bag containing barbecue and dives in, peeling apart the takeout boxes with a crackle of plastic. “Around,” she says. “Thinking things over.”

Steve figures that’s the best that can be hoped for and gets cracking the top off the sugarcane soda and getting out the paper napkins. “How’s tricks with you?” he asks. “Not hiding out from mortal peril out here?”

“Well, no,” Natasha says, her mouth already full of pork. Steve hands her a fork, reproving. “I’m definitely out here to get off the grid,” she continues, swallowing. “But I’m going back tomorrow. Sam and Maria are holding down the fort while I make sure you haven’t died in a ditch.”

“Well, the night’s still young,” Steve says. “And there are just so many great ditches out here.”

“Do your best to resist temptation,” Natasha says, immediately before stuffing a fist-sized chunk of pork in her mouth.

They eat, Steve standing by the porch rail because if he sits now it’ll be a while before he gets up again. He picks out a piece of shoulder and some mashed potatoes and sets them aside on a paper plate. He’s been having middling success in getting Soldier to eat people food; if he puts a covered plate out in the barn then around forty percent of the time it gets eaten.

Unfortunately the rate of getting the plates back is more one time in five. Steve sighs and sets it aside.

“How’s cohabitation?” Natasha asks, reading his mind the way she sometimes does. The ring of sauce around her mouth makes it seem a lot less uncanny now than usual.

“Doing fine,” Steve says, well aware that Soldier is likely lurking nearby. “He’s a nice young man. Very driven.” Natasha grins. “Starting to think there’s something wrong with my cooking, though.”

“Bring home more of this stuff and he’ll eat right up,” Natasha says, waving at the ravaged styrofoam containers.

Steve laughs and sits down heavily on the swing, putting his leg up with a grunt. Natasha curls into him, setting aside her barbecue and pushing him into the cushions until she gets the arrangement she wants. She used to do it in a sexy way, back when she saw him as just another lever she had to press, but these days Steve feels a lot more like a wild jaguar’s favorite toy beanbag.

Natasha underscores the feeling by kneading happily at Steve’s thigh until Steve oofs quietly, the muscle spasming and then releasing under her fingers. “Read me a story, Pappy Steve,” she says.

Steve sighs. “You know I wish I could read, Nat.”

“Okay, I’ll tell a story,” Natasha says. “You illiterate hick. Once upon a time, there was an itsy bitsy spider -”

“Oh no.”

“- and _this itsy bitsy spider_ was living her life, bopping along, taking mercenary contracts from lots and lots of interesting people, because that was the kind of exciting high-roller life she was living after killing off all the handlers that made her. And despite working in a field that fit her unique skillset exactly and practically pooping money, this itsy bitsy spider still had this nagging feeling that _something_ was missing. So she started dating a carnie.”

“Dating?” Steve says to no one. “We’re calling it dating?”

 _“Anyway,”_ Natasha continues, “the carnie was nice but not one hundred percent equipped to help this spider with her personal and professional development. So he introduced her to this one complete fucking psycho, who, at the time, was the head of ops at SHIELD. Now, this guy was _nuts._ Completely out in the peanut fields. Couldn’t tell his ass from his elbow in a sanity contest -”

 _“Wow,”_ Steve says.

“- and when he found out the spider was living in a different hotel room every night under like, sixteen assumed names, he offered his spare bedroom. And at the time the spider thought this was _perfect,_ because, access! Free access to the commander of SHIELD! His house! His things! His psyche! And she didn’t even have to try! But _then. Then_ the itsy bitsy spider found out that this cohabitation situation had _consequences.”_

Steve drops his head back on the swing and rubs his face with one hand. “Making you eat breakfast and stop doing horse tranquilizers is not _consequences.”_

“Hah!”

“Neither is going to Mets games **.”**

 _“As I was saying,”_ Natasha says. “Suddenly the spider was all caught up in everything this crazy did, like going to _community theater productions_ and _making birdhouses._ And this total psycho made her go running with him every morning, and bought her _incredibly_ condescending coloring books to ‘help her work out her feelings’.” Natasha considers this. “Okay, he also did start sparring with her to help her work out her feelings, but he wouldn’t go barehanded and we weren’t even allowed to use knives. Not even fake ones! What kind of training is - anyway,” she says, catching herself. “He was terrible. He cooked her food, and watched her back on missions, and made her do things like stop chewing her nails bloody and pulling out her own hair. He bought her all the books she didn’t know she wanted. He yelled at people who said stupid things. And when she needed help, she got it. For nothing. For free.”

Steve doesn’t say anything. It’s not a smart remark kind of situation.

“Her resources grew,” Natasha continues. “She started to be able to do things she never could before, to think things that had been unthinkable. She made friends. Took an art class. Got a cat. And she started to notice people, people she’d never before thought were people, and things, things she’d never noticed were problems. Her work improved for it. She got even better at her job. She can rely on her team, and they trust her, and together they can do ten times as much as she ever could alone.”

Steve knows why she’s telling this story, why she’s telling it like this, who she’s telling it for, but he can’t help but shut his eyes briefly. It’s because of her skill with lies, he knows, that she can use the truth like this, like a vaccine or a sword, framing it and shaping it and inserting it where it can do the most good.

“And it was the crazy nutcase that made it all possible,” Natasha says, quieter. “He helped her. And now she can help other people.”

Steve, definitely not trusting his voice right now, lays his cheek on Natasha’s head. Natasha very kindly tolerates it.

“It was all you, you know,” Steve says, when his voice can behave itself. “You did it yourself. You just needed the space to get there.”

“And that’s what you gave,” Natasha says.

“Not just me,” Steve says, because it had been Clint that brought her in and Maria and Nick that brought her on.

“You and a couple others,” Natasha allows. “Not many would have taken a chance on me like you did. Not for an enemy assassin with a reputation for backstabbing and crazy.”

“We’ve all got our little personal problems,” Steve says, putting his arm around her when she butts his shoulder with her forehead.

“It’s that can-do attitude that sets you apart from the rest, Rogers,” Natasha says solemnly, and then only cackles and armbars him instead of rebreaking his shoulder when he tries to give her a noogie.  

-o-

Soldier, sitting on the roof of the porch, listens to Widow and Captain roughhouse and laugh and eventually quiet down and move inside. The smells of meat and spices and rich sauce eventually dissipate on the sluggish breeze. The noises of the night wash back in, heavy and thick.

He unlocks the phone again. It’s still open on CNN, and after a brief moment of glitch the video resumes its autoplay. The yellow tickertape scrolls past in a stream of heavy black and white words. _Detention_ _complex destroyed in explosion - Berlin Chief of Police found dead - documents reveal ties to white supremacist terrorist organization -_

He - can’t think about this. He can’t. That was - the headquarters - he can’t think about this. There was a vault there. He can’t do this. That had been - a core cell. A nerve center.

The faces of men who gave him orders are lined up on the screen, one by one, named and exposed and dead. Widow did what she said she would do.

Soldier pulls on his hair until it hurts and listens to the All-Star Frog & Bug Philharmonic giving it everything they’ve got in their nightly performance around him until there’s nothing but the heat and the night and the familiar coal of rage in his belly. He can’t think about this. So he won’t. He needs to do his nightly circle of the property and get what rest he can. There will undoubtedly be _acres_ more stupidity provided by Captain in the morning.

-o-

Natasha leaves the next morning. Or at least, she plans to. She’s halfway out the door with a thermos of Steve’s tea in hand when both of their phones emit a noise guaranteed to wake the dead.

Natasha whirls around. “Barn,” Steve says, “over the cow’s stall,” and Natasha zips off. By the time he makes it there she’s already got the thick briefcase down and is opening it on the ancient workbench, unfolding the mobile command center Stark made Steve take with him out here to the boonies.

“I leave for _five minutes,”_ Natasha says, codging an earpiece into her ear, then, “Widow,” as she comes on the line.

“Rogers,” Steve says, doing the same, and hears it echoed faintly in Natasha’s comm. The screens flicker to life, showing a control center, and then, a couple of satellite maps. “We’re remote. What are we looking at?”

“Skrull raiding party sighted over Quebec **,”** Hill’s voice says. “Heading south fast. With the situation in DC, we’re short. Can you run drone support?”

“Ugh, _Skrulls,”_ Natasha and Steve say almost simultaneously. Skrulls were like syphilis: caught early and managed aggressively they were no problem, but you _did_ have to go after them and you couldn’t afford to let things slip. Thor had tried to explain something about how the Chitauri opening a portal over New York had left some kind of interstellar flashing rest stop beacon in the fabric of spacetime or whatever, which wasn’t helped by how he didn’t seem too clear on the mechanics himself; the results were self-evident, though, and it meant that every Tom, Dick and Hrgl’kk the Martian would swing by every so often and give New York a poke. There’s a permanent Asgardian envoy currently residing off Central Park West and based out of the Freedom Tower that works to intercept friendly or neutral parties and identify hostile ones.

Skrulls are definitely in that last category. They’re apparently a pirate nation, raiding indiscriminately and using their shapeshifting abilities to infiltrate systems and loot with impunity. That’s why you have to blow them out of the sky before they land, unless you want to spend the next three months playing Spontaneous Blood Test Roulette.

“Skrulls,” Maria confirms. “We’ve scrambled two live jets, six drones. You got it?”

“We see them,” Steve says. “We got it. Half and half?” he says to Natasha.

“You take port, I take starboard,” she says, and the command center isn’t really built for two but they make it work, Natasha dragging the bench close with one foot and the two of them squeezing together in front of the console.

It’s a fast-paced but predictable fight, because one of the saving graces of Skrulls is that their many, many pirate bands don’t often talk to each other. They rarely bring new weaponry or strategems to the battle. The pilots in the two jets take care of the main assault with the usual Predators or Stingers; the drones are specially outfitted SHIELD craft used to laser any falling bits of Skrull craft into barbecue briquette to make sure there’s no unfortunate survivors landing in New Brunswick or something. Steve does _not_ want to repeat _that_ shapeshifting alien manhunt expedition.

So he and Natasha are basically running intercept. It’s a job usually done by senior drone techs. Steve briefly wonders what’s going on that Maria’s so short on drone pilots - granted, when Steve left they only had four trained to do this kind of op - but then one of the Skrull flyers makes a deliberate divebomb and he puts the thought aside.

It takes forty minutes. It’s gonna be another eight hours for Hill, but out here they have to do neither politicking nor cleanup. Steve and Natasha take out their earpieces, Natasha scowling when hers catches on her hair. Steve hits the button to fold up the mobile screens and looks up at Natasha, sitting back. “‘The situation in DC’?” he says.

Natasha exhales. “You’re recuperating,” she says bluntly, not even pretending not to know what he’s talking about. “Give me a few more weeks and you’ll be back anyway. You’ll be brought to full speed then, believe me.”

“Do you need help?”

Natasha looks at him for a moment, or rather uses his face as a place for her eyes to rest while she looks inward, running the math. “You are helping,” she says finally. “And if anything goes wrong - wrong enough - you get a deadman switch dump with everything anyway.”

“A deadman switch,” Steve repeats. As in, triggered by Natasha’s death. “That’s how it is?”

Her mouth hooks up in an orca kind of smile. “If it goes so wrong that you have to be told by dead man's switch, I want you exactly as mad as you’re going to be about it. For now, you’re the secret weapon. So, y’know. If you haven’t started ramping up your workouts yet, I’d say now’s the time to start.”

Steve looks into her eyes, and she looks back at him, smiling but grim. “Copy,” Steve says.

-o-

Natasha drives away again, this time in a truck that looks even more beat up than Steve’s own. Steve watches her go; there’s been no sign of Soldier since yesterday afternoon, but the prickling between Steve’s shoulderblades tells him the kid’s definitely around here somewhere. He wonders what he thought of the brouhaha in the barn.

He leaves him be. Whatever Natasha showed him, told him, he clearly needs time to process.

The air goes wet and heavy by midmorning, and the afternoon greys rapidly with the onset of a summer storm. It’s going to be a big one, to build up all day like this; usually they’re there and gone, blowing on down the valley. Steve spends the day figuring out just how much flexibility he's lost and swearing internally at his neck, shoulders, hips, spine and knees. 

By early evening even opening a window feels like being chloroformed. Once the thunder starts in the distance Steve shuts his book and limps outside to batten down anything that needs battening.

The trees are swaying in the rising wind, which is more moving the humidity around than cooling anything. The heat feels like a wet velvet sheet laid across the entire valley. Thankfully, there’s not much to take in; Bessie wanders in and out of the barn as she sees fit, and the chickens have all clustered inside their den of iniquity for the evening. Steve rolls up the truck’s windows and does a last circuit around the farm.

There’s a glint of silver from the top of the house. Steve sighs. “Come down off the roof, champ,” he calls. “It’s gonna thunderstorm, and this place might not have a lightning rod but you’ve definitely got a metal arm.”

There’s a distinctly sullen silence, punctuated only by the creak of the weathercock. Steve’s about to offer to get a stepladder when there’s a light thump of landing by the begonias. Soldier slinks out of the shadows, glaring from beneath his hair as he stalks onto the porch.

“C’mon inside,” Steve says, holding the door open. “The rain tends to go kinda horizontal when the clouds get all curly like that.”

Soldier frowns at him, then leans out over the porch rail and looks up at the sky just as the first droplets start to fall.

One immediately nails him in the eye. He hisses and reels back like a splashed cat, and it’s all Steve can do not to bust up laughing. “Just like that, yeah,” he says instead, controlling his voice by a bare margin. “Only sideways. C’mon. We’ll do something fun.”

Soldier does not look enthused by the prospect of fun, but he slouches into the house after Steve anyway. Once inside he looks more keyed up than he usually does, eyes flicking around like any second now he’s expecting axe murderers to pop out of the woodwork. It’s probably a natural consequence of this morning, and yesterday afternoon too.

Steve considers a game of cards, then tries to remember if he even has a pack. One of his best-kept secrets as an old coot is that he uses his phone to play solitaire. A house like this has got to have a pack of cards somewhere. Then again, Steve thinks sourly, if he goes looking all he’s likely to find is another mouse nest and three new bibles.

Thunder booms. Soldier visibly twitches, his right shoulder jerking up around his ears.

“I need a favor,” Steve decides, turning towards the living room. “I need you to read to me.”

“What?”

“My eyes aren’t what they were,” Steve says, stumping over to the bookshelves. Soldier follows him, palpably puffed up on refusal; despite the whining, however, Steve hasn’t failed to notice that Soldier’s still done everything Steve outright asked him to do. Part of Steve feels bad for being the kind of person who’ll manipulate a brainwashed assassin’s conditioning this way, but the rest of him knows he’s damn well not going to have Soldier out in the rain or cooped up in here, stalking around like a greyhound forced to wear pants **.**

The kid needs entertainment. “I need someone to read this to me,” Steve says, taking a book off the shelf.

Soldier looks at it like it’s the carcass of a toad. “Why.”

“My eyes aren’t -”

“Why _that book!”_

“It’s a good series,” Steve says mildly. “I want to find out what happens next. Come on.” He holds out _THE CASE OF THE GOLDEN HARPOON: A Tracie Wonder Mystery_ and waggles it in the air until Soldier takes it, holding it with two fingers like it’s covered in slime.

“I have to read this?”

“You don’t _have_ to,” Steve says. “But I’m an old man and I’d be much obliged if you gave it a try.”

“How old can you fucking be,” Soldier mutters, sneering at the book cover.

“Hundred and three,” Steve says, in full honesty. “Come on, let’s sit on the couch. Help me move these books.”

Steve’s mostly eked out a single-occupancy spot on the ancient couch where he can nap sitting up and put his leg up, and the rest of it is covered in stacks of books. Soldier ferries them off with bad grace, pushing them any old where on the shelves. Steve doesn’t really blame him. Most of the couch books are interminable Faulkners and Salingers and Fromes that came with the house, and Steve put them there to open up some room for his own books from the Clover Lick Public Library. He can’t really bring himself to feel bad about floor-stacking the fourth fucking copy of The Old Man and The Sea.

“Come on, sit,” Steve says, starting the process of lowering himself and hooking the fossilized ottoman closer with his cane. He glances up at Soldier last minute, brow furrowing in concern. “You _can_ read, right?”

 _“Of course I can fucking read,”_ Soldier snaps, ramming himself up in the couch corner furthest from Steve. “I can read in _eighteen languages.”_

“This one’s English,” Steve says helpfully, pointing at the book. “At least, it should be. My eyes aren’t what they were -”

 _“Gnrgrhh,”_ Soldier says, the sound of ire distilled, and whaps the book open. He glowers at the page. “‘It was June the seventh,’” he reads vengefully, “‘and the pavement was hot, the air was still, and Tracie Wonder was falling out of the fourth story window…’”

Soldier’s diction sounds like if the voice that comes out of Sam’s GPS needed to take a lot of anger management classes, but he reads well enough and he doesn’t actually seem bored. His voice starts changing, too, after only a few pages, his irritation fading as he gets into the story. Steve tries not to feel too smug as he closes his eyes.

It’s another fifteen minutes before Soldier starts trailing off, catching himself and restarting the sentence, reading faster than he’s saying the words aloud. The gaps between his read-alouds get longer, and longer still, then replace the sound of his voice entirely.

Steve opens one eye. Soldier’s still reading, rapt. He flips a page, then another one. He’s holding the book approximately three inches from his nose. Steve closes his eye and settles back into the cushions for a full nap, keeping a straight face to make sure Soldier doesn’t look up and accidentally catch him smiling.

-o-

Steve dozes, slipping in and out of sleep. Soldier’s hunched up in the corner still reading every time Steve cracks an eye, and at some point the book in his hands changes. Steve recognizes the next one in the Tracie Wonder mysteries. Steve doesn’t hold back the smile this time. He used to read to Bucky, back in the war, or at least he’d start out reading and then Bucky would get impatient, climbing onto the cot or over Steve’s legs to pry the book out of his hands and read what happens next for himself. Seems like Soldier’s the same type.

Steve closes his eyes again and settles further into the cushions. He’s currently got four Tracie Wonder books from the library, so he’s got a pretty good idea of what Soldier’s gonna be doing for the next few hours.

-o-

The next morning, Steve opens the cupboard and learns that he is out of oatmeal. He is also out of butter, bacon, sausage, cheese and pancake mix. And milk. Real milk, pasteurized and processed like God and the FDA intended. And he probably _should_ get some Gatorade and popsicles

Soldier is, after some searching, revealed to be in the orchard, in the apple tree nearest to the house. He’s crunching an apple, Steve’s heartened to see, but he lowers it to give Steve a deeply suspicious look as he limps to the foot of the tree.

“No book?” Steve says, knocking on the trunk.

“Finished them,” Soldier says shortly.

“You read fast,” Steve says, impressed. Soldier takes a noisy, pointed crunch of apple. Steve hopes they’re ripe enough to eat. Is it unripe apples that give you the runs? Maybe that was raw onions. Steve’s not sure if Soldier uses the toilet inside the farmhouse at all, but nonetheless makes a mental note to stock up on toilet paper.

“Want to go to town with me?” Steve says aloud. Maybe he can gently introduce the idea of indoor plumbing by making the kid pick his own toilet paper. There can’t be more than, what, twenty-seven different kinds. Character building.

Soldier narrows his eyes. “What for.”

“The groceries don’t grow on trees, champ. And we need propane.” Steve nods out at the truck. “Plus I gotta return some library books. And get new ones.”

That gets him. Soldier does a good job pulling on his usual sullenness, but he jumps out of the tree and heads straight towards the truck. “Hold up,” Steve says, limping after. “We can’t go like this. We need disguises.”

 _“Disguises,”_ Soldier repeats, stopping short.

“Can’t go into town like that,” Steve says reasonably, gesturing at Soldier’s getup. “Folks will think there’s an invasion on. Hold tight, I’ll get you some things to wear.”

Steve goes upstairs and comes back out with some clothes under his arm. Soldier lurks at the mouth of the barn, eyeing him suspiciously. “These’ll fit,” Steve says, laying out the pants and shirt on the polished bench. “You can keep your boots, those’re fine.”

Soldier’s a skinny little thing, ropy with scars and wiry muscle, and he reaches for the jeans and button down like they’ve each personally wronged him. Steve mentally adds jam and peanut butter and a stop at the bakery to his mental list. There’s a fruit stand by the bakery where they can pick up some strawberries, too, if Gary has them this week.

It takes a second, however, for Steve to notice something is missing. “Wait,” Steve says. Soldier’s shucked his uniform and got one foot almost in the jeans. “Where are your underpants?”

 _“What_ underpants,” Soldier snaps.

“Oh, buddy,” Steve says. “Alright, well, we’ll buy you some. Carry on.”

Soldier yanks the rest of the clothes on with a dirty look, like he thinks Steve made up underpants just to spite him. Then as Soldier makes for the truck again Steve stops him. “Gotta wear these too,” he says, handing Soldier a ballcap and tugging one onto his own head. “Critical to the disguise.”

Soldier looks at it mutinously, but finally snatches it out of Steve’s hand and puts it on. Steve’s shirt and jeans hang off his stringbean frame, and between the hat and the hair and the scowl he looks a lot like the teens that hang around the parking lot of the nearest gas station. If not for the stubble and scars on his face he would’ve fit right in.

The truck Natasha saddled him with only has one license plate and looks like it was dragged off an impound lot, but it gets the job done. They stop at the bakery first, because Steve’s hungry and leaving groceries to sit in the truck while you visit other places is a mistake you make only once. Soldier expresses no state of being besides angry sulking, but Steve bets he’s hungry too. The cheesecakes at Charlene’s Cakery are the size of hubcaps and could probably be used to waterproof siding in an emergency. They’ll be just the thing.

Charlene herself is at the counter when they come in, though that’s not too unusual given her employees are her, her husband, her daughter and Mabel the eighty year old cashier. “Roger!” Charlene says.

“Hey, Charlene,” Steve says, anticipating Soldier’s balk and stepping neatly behind him to cut off retreat.

 _“Roger?”_ Soldier hisses, shoulders going up around his ears as he scans the cafe.

“We’re undercover, remember? Go grab us a table.”

Charlene watches Soldier advance on the corner table furthest from the window, calculation obvious on her face, but she must think Steve enough of An Upstanding Citizen to let it slide. “Who’s your friend?” she asks.

“That’s Jimmy,” Steve says, picking a name at random. “He’s staying with me for a while. He’s been -” Steve glances over at Soldier’s hunched stance, waxen face and mortal glare at the napkin dispenser - “sick.”

“Your nephew?” Charlene guesses, and Steve nods, arranging surprise on his face. “We understand,” she says in tones of deep sympathy. “It can be so hard when it’s someone in your family.”

“He’s doing much better,” Steve says, because he doesn’t want anyone showing up on the doorstep with helpful casserole and getting a knife through the eyeball. It would take a lot of doing to get to their doorstep, but Charlene has a twenty year old daughter who gets trotted out in front of Steve like a show pony every time he’s in town, and while Steve’s pretty sure Stacy is about as interested in him as he is in her - id est, not at all - she does have to account for her mother.

“I’m sure he is,” Charlene says. “What’re you having today?”

Steve gets one slice of each of the cheesecakes on display, and she gives him two iced teas on the house. “You take good care of him now, alright?” she says as Mabel rings him up.

“I’ll do my best, ma’am,” Steve says, taking the tray and carrying it back to Soldier. Steve hears Charlene murmur “so sad” and “just terrible, what drugs are doing to young people” and grins to himself.

Soldier levels a glare at Steve’s head that would probably be a lot more effective if he weren’t wearing a ballcap that proclaimed him BECKY ANN’S PIES N’ PUDDIN PIE EATING CHAMPION 1999. “You told them about me,” he says accusingly.

“They think you’re my meth-addicted nephew that got shipped here to straighten up with his Army uncle,” Steve tells him. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Soldier transfers his glare to the slice of cheesecake before him. “What is this.”

“Lemon swirl. Give it a try.”

Soldier gives it a try. Then another try. He keeps on trying it until there’s only the crust left, which he categorically rejects, apparently on moral principle. “That good, huh,” Steve says, pushing another slice over.

Soldier gives it a look like he’s offended not just by this new cake but by the very concept of sharing as well. “That’s chocolate peanut butter,” Steve says helpfully. “My favorite, personally. Love this stuff.” Soldier grimaces; Steve shrugs amiably.  “If you don’t eat it I will.”

Steve watches him struggle between the need to reject everything Steve likes as abhorrent and the clear desire to get some revenge by snatching away from Steve something he has admitted to love. In the end the call of the chocolate wins out. Soldier picks up his fork and stabs it directly into the peanut cup decorating the slice.

Steve, in the interest of upping Soldier’s calorie intake, says nothing and starts in on the raspberry pie.

They chew. True to form, Stacy gets sent out to ask Steve four times if he wants any more tea or milk or coffee. Soldier gives her the rabid seagull eyeball, which she returns with interest. He also switches his and Steve’s iced teas three times, which first Steve thinks is some kind of decoy move born of poisoning paranoia, but then realizes is just Soldier determined to have control of the cup with the most liquid in it.

-o-

“Now what,” Soldier says, the normal edge to his tone blunted somewhat by cheesecake.

“Now we go to the library,” Steve says.

They go to the library. “You can get as many books as you like, but in two weeks we either have to give them back or renew them,” Steve warns. “And some books aren’t renewable if there’s a waiting list, but the librarian will tell us at the checkout if that’s the case.” Steve checks his watch, remembers he hasn’t worn a watch since it got cut off him in the hospital and gropes for his phone. “Meet back here in thirty minutes,” Steve says, showing Soldier the time. “We’ll check out together. Let’s go.”

Thirty minutes later, Soldier has gathered a stack of books so big he has to balance it using his chin. Steve is gratified to see this stack includes all the Tracie Wonder mysteries currently available at the Clover Lick Public Library. Steve carries over his own much more modest stack, and between the two of them they check out thirty-three books, including the entire available Tracie Wonder collection. Luann the librarian - the only person in the county who knows Steve’s real name, by way of having her older sister be a USO chorus girl - gives them a cheery wave as they head out.

 _“Now_ where are we going,” Soldier demands, when it becomes obvious that Steve is not taking them directly home. .

“I told you, we’re getting some underwear,” Steve says as he parks, cheerfully unclicking his seatbelt.

Soldier trails him into the Walmart, less palpably fuming and more visibly itching to go back and bury himself in the books. Steve considers making this fast, but in the end decides against it. Some things can’t be rushed.

Once inside, though, Soldier blinks hard and scoots in a good three feet closer than his usual massive personal space bubble allows, looking around like any minute now the nearby mother and toddlers will attack. Maybe this will have to be rushed.

“Alright, here’s the op,” Steve says, drawing Soldier to the side of the entrance. “You need to pick out ten pairs of underwear. And the ones that come in big packs don’t count. Individual ones only.” Those are the high quality ones, or at least as high a quality as one can get in a Walmart. Living with Sam has rubbed off on him more than he’s thought, if he’s got hifalutin thoughts about knickers, but on the other hand, Soldier deserves decent underthings. Everyone does. An itch-free bum is not to be sneezed at.

 _“Underwear,”_ Soldier says, but he’s watching a nearby clerk scan merchandise with the speed and enthusiasm of an arthritic koala.

“Yep,” Steve says, striking out for the clothing section. “Underwear. Among other things. If you think I haven’t noticed you only have one pair of socks you got another thing coming.”

“What thing,” Soldier says darkly, tagging along behind like an angry tugboat in the stream of a giant cruiseliner.

“What?”

“What _thing_ have I got coming.”

“Oh. Nothing. It’s a figure of speech. Though I guess,” Steve says, “in this particular situation, the thing you’ve got coming to you is more socks. Here we are. Pick some.”

Soldier gives him a profane look and limply lifts the nearest package of socks off its hook. “Great!” Steve says. “Keep going. I’ll go fetch us a cart.”

Soldier tries to keep up the shopping-while-held-at-gunpoint attitude, but as they go on it’s like he can’t help but express an opinion. Steve holds in his smile as he starts offering up the ugliest possible options. “How about these?” he asks, holding up a pair of briefs whose unfortunately positioned camo print and coloring makes the wearer look like they’ve just seriously compromised themselves in the crotch department.

 _“No,”_ Soldier growls, snatching them away.

“No? What about these?” Steve holds up a pair with a photo of a bald eagle printed mid-screech across the dick flap.

 _“Stop helping,”_ Soldier says, grabbing everything out of Steve’s hands and stuffing it back onto the shelf.

“As long as you pick out ten pairs,” Steve says happily.

Soldier growls, snatches up two handfuls of underpants from the clearance bargain bin and drops them into the cart. “Are those your size?” Steve asks innocently.

“Who cares!”

“If they’re too big they’ll just fall right off you. Don’t want to be hitching up your unmentionables the whole time. I’ve got this pair with busted elastic, and let me tell you -”

“Alright! Okay!” Soldier ferries everything back to the bin and starts glaring and yanking out individual pairs like an angry seagull pecking for french fries. Steve resists the urge to whistle under his breath and puts a few packages of socks for himself in the cart.

Next are clothes, since they’re right there and all. They go to the plaid overshirts. Steve takes down a few that he thinks are closest to Soldier’s size and holds them out. Soldier protests that he is not a Small and demands the Large. Steve offers to compromise with a Medium. Soldier snatches the Extra Large off the rack and yanks it on over his existing shirt.

He’s a Small.

Steve manfully resists saying the thoughts in his head, which range from _so you like it extra large?_ to _kid, you look like you’re wearing a plaid muumuu._ “You comfortable like that, champ?” he says instead.

_“Yes.”_

“Whatever you like, honey,” Steve says sweetly. When he turns to hang the Medium and Small back up, he sees a large man in a cap two rows away giving him a pointedly unpleasant look. Steve makes eye contact, holds it and winks. The man turns away, broadcasting disgust across a solid half dozen aisles of basement price jeans and t-shirts.

There had been a time when Steve might’ve been offended. There had been a time where he might’ve even been scared. But a lot of things have lost their bite for him over the years, and these days the disapproval of some bigoted hick doesn’t even register. It’s not like there’s anything left for him to be embarrassed _about._ Steve spent his first five _years_ out of the ice in a constant state of embarrassment. The clothes, the… lack of clothes, the language, the constantly being hit on while in line for bagels, the incredibly intrusive doctors who want him to Talk About Things, the _television shows_ where people do all these things _on camera_ and oh, by the way, _everybody_ has _cameras in their hands that link directly to the entire world and communicate to anyone. Instantly._ Which is a good thing, of course. There are a lot fewer places for injustice to hide these days. Unfortunately, the evaporation of the public blind spot seems to have taken personal privacy with it.

And _then_ the Obama Boner thing happened, which Mrs. Michelle was very gracious about and explained very kindly about linguistic drift and twenty first century colloquialisms. Tony still calls it the Oboner. So does the entire internet. And after inadvertently talking about erections to the First Lady of the United States, well, what _is_ shame, anyway? What good is it doing him, out here in this wild west of the new century?

Besides, by that point he’d gotten fed up with people asking him about his lack of date at every event and gala and dinner he was shoveled into, so on a lark he’d asked Peg if she was up to joining him at the Firefighter’s ball. And was she ever. She’d worn a glittering, draping golden dress that made her look like Greek royalty and she’d had two of her grandkids string glowing fairy lights all through her wheelchair, so when they rolled up the red carpet there wasn’t a single camera that didn’t go off.

She joined him for nearly every single event after that. She kept wearing the most marvelous dresses, peacock feathers and velvet and embroidered silk, and they’d lurk in corners or sit at the bar and whisper petty, silly things to each other all night long like they really were two lovesick idiots not old enough to know better. Steve had gotten four years and ten months, playing gin rummy with Peg in the park and getting away with being old and eccentric together at public functions, and it was more that a lot of other people ever got.

After the funeral - well, a good while later, really, but Steve still thinks about events like that, before and after, and this was in the after - Natasha had taken it on herself to go as his companion. And _she_ liked to wear all the really fun disguises she never really got a chance to in the field, so the press had a series of field days about the apparent string of different women on his arm. Not much of it was flattering, in Steve’s opinion. But, well, who gave a damn? Hell, he would’ve taken Bucky on his arm, if Buck had turned out to be serious

And if he had survived, of course.

That’s always where those thoughts end. These days Steve’s a little better about not letting himself slip down a mope spiral, so he turns back from the shirts. Soldier’s eyeing him suspiciously. It’s possible Steve was straightening the rehung clothing with more care than was perhaps warranted. “You got your overshirts, champ?” Steve says, setting all that aside. “Great. Let’s go try on some jeans.”

Soldier gets serious about the pants, at least, once he sees the variety of multi-pocket cargos and pseudomilitary gear on offer. He picks out three pairs of black cargos with zippers and buttons and velcro, and doesn’t even protest when Steve snags a few grey and black shirts (Small) and chivvies him to the fitting rooms.

There’s only a few tiny cubicles, white pasteboard and linoleum harshly lit with fluorescents, several of which are flickering enough to look significantly haunted. Steve opens the door of the one with the bench next to it; Soldier stalks in while Steve sits down heavily and stretches his leg out, sighing. It’s at the point where he’s starting to really feel the pins in his knee and ankle and they’re getting to be more a hindrance than a help. Still a month before he can get them safely out, though, and Dr. Cho has enough experience working with his tissues that Steve trusts her timeline.

Steve fishes out his phone and gets the color matching game loading. He’s beaten all the levels and is just replaying at this point, but it’s still fun. Soothing. It’s a whole seven minutes before he realizes he hasn’t heard anything from Soldier inside the changing cubicle, not even cloth rustling.

“How’s it looking, champ?” he says, knocking his knuckles back against the door. “Champ?”

No answer. Steve, grunting slightly, leans down to look under the door. Soldier’s legs are definitely right there, in his borrowed jeans and heavy tac boots. Steve’s gotta get the kid sneakers. “Got yourself stuck in the zipper?”

No answer. No movement, either. Steve stands up, changing his grip on the cane and rolling out his shoulders. “I’m coming in, buddy,” he says, opening the door.

Soldier’s - fine, he’s right there, but he’s also staring at nothing and frozen to the spot. He got his shirt off, and his hat is on the bench, but it looks like he got stuck halfway through trying a new shirt on. The flickering fluorescent panel is right above the mirror, and Soldier’s half-turned away from it, stiff and trembling, his flesh shoulder hunched up as if to ward off a blow.

“Buddy,” Steve tries, swearing internally. “You with me?”

No change. Steve swears some more, bigger internal swears and then risks touching Soldier’s flesh elbow. It feels cold and clammy. Steve bites the bullet and closes in, leaning his cane against the wall to carefully put both arms around Soldier, bringing him in and pressing his face to Steve’s chest.

Soldier doesn’t resist, or even seem to notice. Steve puts one hand on the back of Soldier’s head and turns them further, blocking off as much of the mirror and the light as he can. Soldier shouldn’t be able to see much anyway, his forehead mashed to Steve’s clavicle. Hopefully that’ll take care of whatever the stimulus was.

Steve cautiously brings his other hand up and checks Soldier’s pulse. It’s a lot faster than it should be, his breathing too, so Steve sighs and rubs Soldier’s back between his shoulders and talks low about the first time he’d lost the plot in a massive grocery store and Sam had to talk him out of the yogurt aisle and how that’s fine and Walmart probably just does this to people.

He starts getting signs of life around minute seven. That’s good; he’d once had to sit in a gym bathroom with Natasha for nearly two hours before she was in any state to be mobile. The best thing to do would probably install Soldier in the greenhouse trough with a popsicle for a couple of hours, but right now Steve will settle for leaving this Walmart. “Hey,” he says gently, leaning back just enough to get a look at Soldier’s face. “You with me, champ?”

Soldier looks pretty emphatically not with him, but after a moment Steve gets a mechanical nod all the same. “Why don’t we get you out of here,” Steve tries. Another delayed nod.

“Alright,” Steve says. “Go straight outside and wait in the truck. Understand?” Nod. “What’re you gonna do?”

A couple more grams of recognition spark fitfully behind Soldier’s eyes. “Go straight outside.” He swallows laboriously, his eyes darting around briefly before returning to stare somewhere around Steve’s sternum. “Wait in the truck.”

“Good. That’s exactly right.” Steve rubs Soldier’s flesh shoulder again. “I’ll walk with you to the exit. Then I have to buy our things. After that I come right back out, and we go home. Alright? Understood?”

“Understood.”

“Good. Here are the keys. Come on, let’s get your shirt back on.”

Steve untangles them slow, keeping an arm around Soldier as he snags the shirt he’d come in with. Soldier mechanically lets Steve poke  his arms through the sleeves and button it up, staring at the ground, so Steve says, “Have I told you about the time I wiped out on my bike directly into a swamp full of crocodiles? Well, I was doing a hundred and five through the Everglades…”

They make it to the exit, Soldier marching stiffly under Steve’s arm. Steve pushes the door open, stepping out to the parking lot, and the gust of hot, humid air makes Soldier blink fast and look up, rallying a little. “There we go,” Steve says. “You got the keys?”

That makes Soldier look at him like he’s speaking Martian, so Steve gets the keys from Soldier’s pocket and folds Soldier’s flesh hand around them. “Go ahead and wait in the truck,” Steve says. “I’ll be back in ten minutes. I’ll buy our things and we go home. Understood?”

“Understood,” Soldier says creakily, none of his usual attitude, but he swivels towards the parking lot. He doesn’t quite seem to be able to figure out what happens next, though. Steve decides he better see this through and takes Soldier by the elbow again.

When they get to the truck Steve decides sunlight and sauna-like humidity are good for the body and soul, so he takes the car keys back, folds out the truck bed and sits Soldier down. “Take a break,” Steve tells him, unlocking the cabin and rolling the window down with the crank. “If you get too hot go sit inside. Here’s the keys. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Got it? Understood?”

“Understood,” Soldier repeats, and while he looks about as natural and relaxed as a plastic Halloween skeleton he’s at least holding onto the keys and blinking blearily at his surroundings. Steve takes it as a win.

He lopes back into the store, jogging around his limp, and just bundles up everything that was in the dressing room along with his cane. The checkout is where he gets stuck: there’s twenty people in line and only one register open. Fucking Walmart. Steve oozes through the line at the speed of water running uphill, racing through paying the cashier and finally making it back outside six minutes over the deadline he gave Soldier.

At first it seems like all is well - the truck is still there and no part of the parking lot is on fire, so Steve’ll take it. It’s not empty anymore, though: there are male voices out there of the pitch usually employed by Young Assholes, and they come into view, two men in the ubiquitous ballcap t-shirt and jeans, walking on the opposite side of an empty parking row from Soldier and the truck. Steve hears an indistinct word and some loud laughter a second before the dark shape of Soldier vaults out of the back of the truck and goes for the civilians like a guided missile.

Steve drops his bags and makes it across the lot in seven strides, adrenaline completely overriding the limp and the cane only coming along by dint of being hooked over his wrist. He doesn’t intercept so much as assume a collision course as Soldier cannons into him, and if the kid weighed even fifteen pounds more Steve might’ve toppled over.

As it is, it’s like catching a hundred and fifty pounds of landed barracuda. “Whoa, whoa,” Steve manages, as Soldier very nearly flips over his shoulder. “What’s going on? What happened?”

“I’ll _kill them,”_ Soldier hisses, all traces of earlier unresponsiveness gone; he’s writhing like a rabid possum. “What happened?” Steve repeats, trying to grapple Soldier around enough to make his feet touch the ground. “What did they do?”

“They called me a dyke!”

Steve frowns. “A what?”

“That’s _not_ my name!”

“It’s not,” Steve agrees. He’s managed to hold Soldier at arm’s length, feeling his body vibrating under his hands, but the look on Soldier’s face is very motivated and it’s not gonna hold him for long. “What’s a dyke?”

This seems to stymie Soldier briefly, but it doesn’t last long. “They _laughed!”_

“Right,” Steve says, making an executive decision. “Get in the truck.”

 _“I’ll kill them,”_ Soldier snarls, redoubling his struggle.

“No,” Steve says, leveraging his hold on Soldier’s shoulders and trying to walk him backwards. “Go sit in the truck.”

_“What?”_

“I said go sit in the truck.”

_“No!”_

“Soldier,” Steve says, pressing his palm to the side of Soldier’s face to keep it still and bending down to look him in the eyes. They’re grey, a kind of grey Steve doesn’t think about often and won’t now. It’s not important. “They’re over by the store now. The store has cameras all around the outside, and people and employees who might see you through the doors. You go over there, you get recorded or seen. Understand? Sit down.”

“No!”

“I’ll bring them to you.”

This seems to surprise Soldier enough that he quits fighting, and Steve pushes him down to sit in the truck bed as gently as he can. “Wait here,” he repeats, hoping it’ll stick, and limps off around the truck.

The two guys are looking back at them, and once they realize Steve’s heading their way they appear to be having an argument. One of them seems to want to retreat to the store while the other is visibly puffing himself up. Steve leans harder on his cane and limps prodigiously.

The puffing one seems to win. “Yeah?” he says as Steve nears. “What do you want?”

“Depends,” Steve says, closing the last of the distance. “You gonna come back with me and apologize?”

The two of them both gape at him for a second before Puffin recovers. “No fucking way,” he swears. “For what? You a fag too?”

Steve sighs. “In your lexicon, yeah, probably,” he says, then, while they’re trying to figure out what he said, whacks Puffin on the shins with his cane and grabs Coward by the scruff of the neck.

Puffin yells and grabs for him, naturally, so Steve uses the cane to spin him around and hook one arm behind his back. He reels both of them in, changing his grip on Coward just enough so he won’t try anything creative, and marches them all back towards the truck.

Around halfway there they seem to have an epiphany and really start struggling, so Steve adjusts his grip again and lifts both of them off the ground. This seems to activate Coward’s limp kitten reflex, but Puffin squawks _“What the fuck!”_ just as Steve gets back to the car.

Soldier is watching these theatricals with his mouth hanging open. Steve hefts the two starring antagonists and makes sure they’re looking at Soldier. “Apologize,” he tells them.

They do not get the message. Puffin especially redoubles his ardent wiggles, scratching frantically at Steve’s shoulder. “What the fuck! This is assault! Let me go!”

“I will,” Steve says. Soldier has yet to get rid of his guppy impression. It’s kind of cute. Steve winks at him. “Just as soon as you apologize.”

“Fuck you!”

“I can be here all day,” Steve says mildly. It’s not a strain to hold them up. His shoulder’s really improved in the past few weeks; he should start lifting weights again. “Apologize.”

“I’ll call the fucking cops, you fucking faggot -”

“Andy! Just say you’re fucking sorry so we can fucking _go!”_ Coward bursts out, in a fit of perspicacity. “Come on! Just do it!”

“No fucking way!” Puffin Andy yells, unwilling or unable to acknowledge that his shoes are a good two feet from the ground. “What’s he gonna do, huh? He’s just fucking standing there! Fuck you!”

“You’re right,” Steve says. “This isn’t much of an incentive. Soldier, help me take their pants off.”

Suicidal Andy gives a screech and starts kicking like a donkey. Then he freezes and goes quiet, because Soldier’s stood up and drawn a knife. It’s not one of the utilitarian hunting knives Steve gave him from the bait shop. This blade is black, anodized, and there is no mistaking it for anything but a weapon.

And now Steve’s got to tread carefully, because Soldier’s not in the most stable place and Steve’s holding up two civilians who probably don’t deserve to have parts cut off just because they’re fucking morons.

Luckily, Soldier does not immediately go for the throat. “I don’t want your pants,” he says menacingly. “I want your wallets.”

“Hey, come on, we’re not going to mug them just because they’re idiots,” Steve says. “That’s not nice. And what do you need money for? I know you know where my wallet is. And all the cash in the house besides.”

“I don’t want their _money,”_ Soldier says in scathing incredulity. “I want their _photo identification._ I’ll have your _names,”_ he says, attention back on the dastardly duo, making the knife do a flickering kind of flip over his fingers. “And I’ll know your _address.”_

Suicidal Andy and his slightly more self-preserving friend try to turtle back inside their shirts while trying not to make any visible movements. Soldier might be wearing clothes four sizes too big and a champion pie hat but there’s nothing funny about his stance and his hold on the knife is pure professional. “This is why you shouldn’t yell names at strange people in parking lots,” Steve says. “Some of them might turn out to be us. Now apologize before we decide to make the lesson stick.”

“Sorry,” squeaks out Self-Preservationist, thank god, with Puffin Andy half a beat behind.

“Good,” Steve says, giving them both a friendly shake. “Don’t call people dyke.” Then he drops them, using the motion to step forward and block whatever Soldier might feel moved to do.

He does lunge forward, but he bounces off Steve’s chest too easily for it to have been a lethal attempt, and it gets the terrible two scrambling. Steve doesn’t really think Soldier’s gonna go after them for real this time, but just to make sure he steps forward and scoops Soldier up, one arm diagonal around his waist.

Soldier immediately bites Steve’s shoulder, probably entirely out of shock, because in the next second he’s back to the usual wet-cat thrashing. Steve grins as he carries Soldier one-armed to the passenger seat. “Bought you those underwear,” he says, over Soldier loudly spitting what must be the terrible, terrible taste of Steve’s t-shirt out of his mouth.

“Put me down!”

“Gladly,” Steve says, depositing Soldier in the seat and then piling some of the library books into his lap to stop him from leaping up again. He shuts the door on a sputtering Soldier and gets around to the driver’s side, starting the truck and peeling out before they can have any more charming encounters with local wildlife.

Soldier spends half the ride home leveling a stare like a buzzsaw at the side of Steve’s head. Steve considers ignoring it a little longer, but then again, probably best not to let this ferment. The second he glances over Soldier immediately snaps, “I was handling it.”

“Sure,” Steve says. “But we don’t kill people in parking lots just because they’re idiots. Otherwise we just wouldn’t have enough hours in the day.”

“They were _bastards,”_ Soldier says with feeling.

“Sure,” Steve says. “And they got their comeuppance. Do you think they didn’t?”

 _“No,”_ Soldier says mulishly.

Well, time for The Talk. “Alright. What do you want to do?” Steve asks. “We could find them. Ask around, get their names, their addresses. Slip in at night and slit their throats while they sleep. Then they’ll never call anyone names ever again. Never do anything else, either, but hey. And then, well, we can’t stop there, can we? There’s a prison about thirty miles away. I know for a fact there’s a man in there who got drunk and ran over a little girl a couple months ago. She was three. I think that’s worse than calling someone a name, don’t you? Let’s get him too. And while we’re there, well - it’s a prison. Everybody in there’s got to have done _something_. We can’t just let them get away with -”

 _“Stop,”_ Soldier says. “Stop. Fucking stop.”

“You don’t want to kill them?”

_“No.”_

“Alright,” Steve says equably. “Me neither.”

Soldier sits hunched for the rest of the drive, burning a hole out the passenger window with his eyes. When they pull into the farmhouse clearing he angrily grabs up his stack of library books and makes to beeline for the barn, but Steve stops him with a hand on the shoulder.

“We gotta keep those on the bookshelves,” Steve says. “They’re not our property. We can’t keep them anywhere they might get damp or animals might get at them.”

Soldier scowls, but he does shift direction to face the house instead. His scowl deepens. “Door’s always open,” Steve says. “And you can read wherever. We just gotta keep the books where they belong.”

Soldier hasn’t made any motion to remove Steve’s touch, but his shoulder feels rock hard with tension. Steve drops his hand. Soldier immediately heads for the house with his books, not looking back.

Steve watches him go, thoughtful. Lifting those two kids in the parking lot hasn’t given him the shoulder trouble he thought it would. He really should step up his workouts. Under normal conditions Steve’s body tends to go squirrelly without a daily workout that involves some kind of sparring, but so far his system seems to have its hands full just regrowing various tissues. He does his PT and all, but that stuff’s pretty tame compared to what he used to do before breakfast every morning.

Hell, maybe he’ll take Soldier jogging.  

Steve looks over at the house. Soldier, still in his borrowed shirt and jeans, has installed himself on the roof next to the moss-covered chimney and opened a book. Steve grins and goes to ferry the groceries out of the truck.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- Clover Lick, WV, is a real place. I’ve never been. I was just google mappin’ and liked the name enough to desecrate it 
> 
> \- I dont know nothin about aerial battles with aliens or otherwise but i figure as a commander steve would be doing Guy In The Chair stuff and thats what he + natasha does there
> 
> \- Additionally, i know neither shit nor fuck about skrulls


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i know i said ch 3 of 3 but due to circumstances it's 3 of 4 now
> 
> Q says: Updated to add chapter art at the end BETTER LATE ETC.

Steve expects Soldier to sulk for a while, and he does, disappearing when he’s not on the roof reading books. Steve keeps leaving food out, and presumably it gets eaten; he took Natasha’s advice and cracked open the IDIOT’S COOKBOOK again, this time on the MEAT section (IF YOU’RE GONNA EAT A DEAD ANIMAL, FOR PETE’S SAKE DON’T POISON YOURSELF WITH IT) and jerry-rigged himself something like a proto-grill out of two bricks and some chickenwire on top of the stove. 

The results have been promising. He’s getting the plates back three times in five now, even paper ones. Soldier’s still doing his best Invisible Man impression, but Steve figures the kid will get back to savaging trees and stalking around like a beestung badger when he’s ready. Probably when he runs out of books.  

Or if something pushes him, as it turns out. 

“A cat’s stopped eating,” Soldier says, looking deeply, existentially uncomfortable. He’s waylaid Steve on the porch, coming out to retrieve the bowl. 

“Because you’re eating the food before it gets to it?” Steve can’t help but say. 

_ “No.”  _ Soldier scowls, then fidgets. “There’s something wrong with its mouth.” 

“Which cat?” Steve says, which makes Soldier lope off and return ten minutes later, covered in cobwebs and dust with a silently struggling bundle of grey fur in his arms. Steve doesn’t want to know what barn bolthole he pulled the cat out of, since he apparently had to insert his whole body in it first. 

“Its face is swollen,” Soldier says distractedly, seeming not to notice the cobweb over his ear or the cat’s determined swipes as he lifts it up and angles for a better look. 

This cat’s not one of the friendly ones. Steve cautiously leans in. “I think he’s got something stuck in his face,” he says. “A splinter or something. It’s gotten infected.”

“Can you get it out?” 

“Let’s see,” Steve says, and goes to find the tweezers. 

The cat is not happy about any of the following proceedings. Soldier keeps both hands clamped firmly around the cat while also treating the animal like it’s got bones of spun sugar and a core of radioactive isotopes, which means Steve has to navigate around his grip to get a look at the cat’s face. He finally ends up just squishing the cat to the table with one hand while leaning in close enough to see but not get bit.

“Sure looks like a splinter,” he says, squinting. “All right. Keep him still and I’ll try and get it out.” 

Soldier, reluctant, slightly shifts his hold on the cat. Steve resigns himself to getting chomped at some point and picks up the tweezers. 

The cat growls deep in its chest as Steve closes back in, but once he gets a grip on the splinter it’s an easy draw out. The cat, of course, does not appreciate this, yowling madly with its ears flattened back as Steve triumphantly discards the inch-long sliver of wood. He thinks maybe Soldier breathes out in relief but he can’t be sure. 

It’s pretty badly infected, though: even with the splinter gone the cat’s face is puffy and misshapen. “This probably needs antibiotics,” Steve says, putting the tweezers down. 

“You have medicine,” Soldier says.

Steve shakes his head. “Even if I had antibiotics, they’d be human doses.” He sighs. “Come on. Wrap this guy up in a towel.”

Soldier pulls the cat very slightly closer. “What are you going to do to it.”

“Take him to the vet so we can get him some cat drugs,” Steve says. “There’s one for livestock about an hour away. Come on. She’ll probably see us if we knock on her door and give her money.” 

It’s late afternoon by the time they pull up to the horse ranch, Soldier in the passenger seat in his civilian disguise with the cat all toweled up in his lap. They both more or less have the same expression of crabbed suspicion on their faces, squinting belligerently out the windshield and window. The cat’s probably only squinting because half its face is blown up like a puffer fish, but the effect is the same. 

Steve parks on the gravel spread between the main building and the  - barns? Stables? Horse warehouses? - just as the vet herself strides out. Dr. Quintessence Meadows - “call me Tess or else” - is broad, red-haired and walks like a lady who knows she can knock out a charging stallion with one punch. At least, Steve assumes that’s how one stops charging stallions. She’d certainly hauled Bessie around like the cow weighed as much as a kitten when Steve had gone to find a professional about things like strange bovines turning up in barns. 

Looking at her once again, Steve privately wonders if she’s related to Thor. The knee-high rubber boots and matching rubber apron do little to dispel the similarities. She squints at the truck, then raises her eyebrows as Soldier gets out with the cat-towel burrito clutched close to his chest, squinting right back at her like an angry bulldog. 

“How’s it going?” Steve asks, climbing out after Soldier. “Busy in there?”

“Did you know,” Dr. Meadows says, still looking at Soldier, “that Clydesdales can get diarrhea?” 

Steve, entirely unprepared for every single word in that sentence, struggles for a reply and finally comes out with, “Wow!”

“That’s what I said, too,” Dr. Meadows says grimly. “What’ve you got for me?”

Soldier, apparently deciding to forgo churlishness for expediency, sticks the cat out at her straight-armed like he’s presenting a baby for baptism. “There’s something wrong with its face.” 

Dr. Meadows peers at the cat. The cat hisses. “You don’t scare me,” she tells it. “I’ve been sprayed with partially digested oats at chest height three times today.” 

Soldier displays a brand new facial expression that says he’d give up a pound of flesh to un-know this information. “Definitely looks infected,” Dr. Meadows says. “C’mon and bring her inside.” 

_ Inside _ is the cupboard-sized office wedged in between an equally small mudroom and the horses’ stalls, all of which seem like equine presidential suites. Dr. Meadows clears stacks of binders off the counter acting as a desk and beckons for Soldier to put the cat down. People in hard-wearing jeans and similar rubber attire are in the corridors, working with mops and shovels at things Steve isn’t looking too hard at, and they hardly glance at him and Soldier as they squeeze past. 

Soldier reluctantly puts the cat-rito down on the counter, keeping hold of the towel to stop it from launching itself into the horse labyrinth never to be seen again. Dr. Meadows expertly takes over, catching the cat in some kind of judo hold and keeping it remarkably still. “Got something stuck in its face, you said?”

The exam is brief, but Steve supposes it’s no great mystery as to what’s wrong with the patient in question. “He needs antibiotics and some wound care,” Dr. Meadows tells them. “We don’t have the right stuff for him here, but I can keep him overnight and take him to the small animal vet in the morning.”

“Why don’t you have the right stuff,” Soldier says. 

“Size,”’ Dr. Meadows tells him, one ginger eyebrow going up in amusement. “Cats,” she says, holding her palms close together, “Horses.” She spreads her hands all the way apart. “The smallest syringe we got here is the size of your arm.”

Soldier’s face recoils while the rest of him stays still, making for some fascinating tectonics in the chin region. 

“You’ll be able to pick him up tomorrow,” Dr. Meadows continues, clearly enjoying this reaction. “They’ll have all the care instructions and everything there. That’ll be ninety bucks, please,” she adds to Steve, who’s so relieved to avoid any further discussion of equine intestinal issues that he digs out six twenties.

Soldier doesn’t exactly seem like he wants to stick around, but he stops short of the truck and looks back at the horse warehouse like he’s trying to decide whether to storm back in there and snatch the cat out of the jaws of certain doom. 

He looks too small, suddenly, staring back like that. “C’mon,” Steve says, unlocking the truck. “Let’s have a cookout for dinner. We can use up some of the firewood you… optimized. We’ll -” what the hell do people do with campfires when not on the Western Front - “bake apples. And, hey! If we stop by the store on the way home we can make s’mores.” 

-o-

“Isn’t this nice,” Steve says. They’re between the greenhouse and the barn, close enough to the trough for water, and some good-natured prodding had gotten Soldier to dig enough loose bricks and stones out of the grass to make a rough fire pit. Some more prodding got him to drag over the bench, a couple of ancient plastic chairs and a few of the barn’s moldering stumps for seating. The kindling Soldier made out of the firewood is plentiful, at least, and so thoroughly shredded that it catches easily when Steve lights the match. 

Setting up the sausages and onion and steaks on Steve’s chickenwire grill is pretty easy, but it takes some futzing to get the apples in tin foil and around halfway through wrapping them Steve remembers he’s gotta core the little bastards and put in sugar and cinnamon first. At least, according to the IDIOT’S GUIDE (“IF YOU DON’T WRAP YOUR APPLES YOU MIGHT AS WELL JUST POUR SOME APPLE JUICE INTO A HANDFUL OF HOT DIRT AND EAT THAT”). Luckily Soldier doesn’t notice this little slip up. He’s too busy staring at the graham crackers, marshmallows and chocolate laid out on a stump. 

“Why the fuck,” he says, at length, “do I have to make a sandwich.”

“What’s that?”

“The sausage I understand. It’s raw. But all of these ingredients,” Soldier says, in the tones of a very, very strained kindergarten teacher dealing with a very, very dim child, “are edible on their own.”

“Ah, but the roasting is half the fun,” Steve says genially.

“I do not want,” Soldier says, “half the fun.” 

“You haven’t even tried one,” Steve says encouragingly. “Go on. Try roasting one. It really is fun.” He’s definitely not going to mention that during his own introduction to s’mores - via Natasha, who got the idea from an old back issue of Family Fun in the SHIELD dental office - he had made this exact same protest. 

Soldier stares fixedly at the marshmallow Steve is squishing onto the end of a stick. He transfers his gaze to the bag of soft white cylinders, promisingly puffy. He stands abruptly and stalks off into the gloom. 

Steve figures he’ll have to tend the apples alone and try to tempt Soldier out of the hayloft layer with the smell, but it turns out he only went to go fetch a stick of his own. He strips off stray twigs with a few efficient swipes of his knife, and when Steve helpfully holds out the marshmallow bag Soldier grabs three at once and harpoons their helpless flesh on the end of his spit.  

Into the fire they go. “Careful,” Steve says. “Sugar’s flammable. If you hold them too close to the flame they’ll… ah… yeah.” They watch the marshmallows ignite one by one, rapidly blackening and blistering. “Pretty much just like that.” 

Soldier stares at the sad, smoking lumps. He narrows his eyes, yanks the blackened corpses off with his metal hand and then slams another one onto the stick. 

Over the next fifteen minutes Soldier cremates eight more marshmallows, angrily discards all of them, and in the process glues up his metal hand. Steve suspects that the frustration Soldier is expressing is probably genuine, but his roasting technique would likely improve if he wasn’t stealing chocolate every time he thinks Steve isn’t looking. There’s more and more missing every time Steve glances back at the stump. 

“You know what,” Steve says, once the marshmallow population has been devastated and Soldier is sulkily soaking his left hand in the greenhouse trough, “why don’t we hold off on dessert.”

He decides not to mention the disappearing chocolate. It’s not worth it to score any points. 

When the meat is finally done, Soldier eats with a knife, stabbing resentfully at the sausages and onion chunks and bringing out a second knife to spear his steak and use the other to carve off bits of it directly into his mouth. He doesn’t look particularly thrilled by anything like flavor, just chomps down while glaring into the fire. 

The baked apples, however, are a hit. Soldier eats three, sticky sugar and hot juices glistening on his scraggly beard. It even seems to relax him some; he takes the napkin Steve hands him, and for the first time displays an acknowledgment of the existence of personal grooming by tucking his lank hair behind his ears. He’s back in his fatigues, but he’s got the pants rolled up to mid-calf and somewhere between the s’more skirmish and the apple armistice the boots disappeared. 

Steve’s stuck between encouraging the nod towards relaxation and worrying Soldier’s gonna step on a stray ember or something, sitting this close to the fire. Steve should have bought him a pair of those hideous plastic slippers he sees all the teenagers wearing, with matching mid-calf white socks.

The apples mellow the kid out, at least. He rests his elbows on his knees and levels a contemplative look at the dark yard, though his general countenance still says that what he’s contemplating is arson. 

“Penny for your thoughts,” Steve says, not really expecting an answer so much as an insult. 

Soldier does scowl at him, but after a couple seconds he turns his glower on Steve’s legs. “How did it really happen,” he says shortly, jerking his chin at Steve’s cane. “I mean it. What happened  _ really.”  _

Steve sighs and settles back further in the plasticky chair. “An alien whale did fall on me,” he says. “The building I was evacuating, anyway. I’d been retired for a few months when they called me in and said, look, you can go back to your art classes later, we’ve just got some aliens for you to punch. So I went. Got unlucky.” He stretches his leg out a little more, flexing his foot. The bones don’t grind against each other in there anymore, which is nice. 

“How long have you been on leave,” Soldier says. 

“This’ll be month three.”

“How bad was it.” 

Steve shrugs. “Laid there for two days while they dug me out, and a few things had healed wrong already by then. A pipe went right through my hip and a girder got me from here to here, so they had to reconstruct this whole leg, more or less. It won’t be right for a while yet. I’ve got an appointment in a month for another surgery to get all the staples and pins out.” 

Soldier eyes Steve’s leg, brows wedged down low over his eyes. “Why are you out _ here?”  _

“What do you mean?” 

_ “Here.  _ Why couldn’t you stay close to your doctors. Why are you hiding.” 

“Oh, yeah,” Steve says. “Couple of people tried to kill me while I was in the hospital.” 

_ “What?” _

“I was fine,” Steve says. “The nurse beat one of them unconscious with a bedpan.”

_ “One of them?”  _

“It was a couple of different attempts -”

_ “A couple?”  _

“Well, three,” Steve admits. “But I was fine. They even found the car bomb before anyone else got hurt.” 

_ “Car bomb!”  _

“It wasn’t  _ my  _ car.” Steve scratches his nose. “Not sure what made them think I drive a neon orange Prius.” 

“Who did it.” 

“They’re looking into it,” Steve says. “But in the meantime, Natasha thought it would be a good idea if I recovered somewhere a little less obvious. So once I was good to move I came out here.” 

_ “Alone?”  _

“Not at first,” Steve admits. “Natasha and some other friends took turns playing nursemaid. And now there’s you!” he adds cheerily. “You’re a very experienced operative. Nothing can happen to me when you’re around.” 

Soldier glowers at him, clearly stuck between giving an inaccurate security assessment and refuting his own competence. One agent is never enough to secure a box of kleenex, let alone a dozen-acre property, but hotshot Soviet assassins are presumably supposed to be able to secure the Pentagon with one hand tied behind their back. 

“Besides,” Steve says. “Any intruder we get, Bessie might trample them first.” 

“Your  _ security detail  _ is a  _ cow,”  _ Soldier says, like he’s trying to make sure he heard that right. 

“She’s unbribable,” Steve points out. 

_ “How are you not dead,”  _ Soldier demands.

Steve smiles, even as he can feel it turning wry, too honest. “Luck.” 

-o-

Four hours later, in bed, Steve cracks an eye. Soldier’s standing at the foot of the bed, a barely perceptible shape in the dark. He’s been standing there a while. 

Steve closes his eye. Unless and until Soldier tries to murder him in his sleep, Steve assumes that whatever this is, it’s just something the kid’s gotta get out of his system. 

-o-

The next day Captain gets a call from the horse doctor, and they get back in the truck. They drive to a new place, not the horse palace; this looks like someone’s house except for the signs in the yard and next to the door. 

Inside has definitely been converted for animal examinations. The grey cat has been confined to a plastic box with a jail-cell grille barring one end. Half its face has been shaved and there is a large white plastic cone affixed around its neck. It glares balefully out at them and hisses when Captain leans down to get a better look.

“You’ll have to keep him in the house with you while the cone is on,” the tiny doctor who isn’t the horse lady says. “Preferably a quiet room somewhere. Is this something you’re able to provide?” 

“Yeah, we can do that,” Captain says. “Do we need to feed it a special diet, or…?”

It turns out that they will have to administer the medication, via oral syringe, morning and evening for the next two weeks. The cat, growling continuously throughout the explanation, does not seem to be overwhelmingly enthused by this fast approaching future. Soldier understands completely. Oral administration is the absolute fucking worst. 

“Could be worse,” Captain says, proving that nobody has ever grabbed him by the face and shoved anything into his mouth for some nameless purpose. “At least we don’t have to apply anything rectally.”

Soldier has to concede that wrong as he perpetually is, in this one instance Captain has a point. 

They take the cat back to the farm, where they have to administer the first dose. “Alright, let’s give this a try,” Captain says, placing the cat container on the kitchen table. “You open the hatch, I’ll grab him, we’ll give him the medicine.” 

Opening the hatch is a mistake. The cat is a goddamn escape artist and actively suicidal to boot. The second the box opens it claws its way across Captain’s chest and directly up his face and Soldier thinks that’s it, the cat’s dead. He never should have gone into the crawl space under the porch and dragged it out. He lunges to get to the cat before Captain can, but it just gives him the same treatment, bolting under the table and leaving them with matching bleeding scratches all over their faces. A creature composed of ninety percent bedraggled hair shouldn’t be able to do this kind of damage. 

“Okay,” Captain says, “maybe that wasn’t my best plan.”

“Don’t kill the cat,” Soldier says immediately, before Captain can get any ideas.

Captain stares at him, mouth hanging open. “What?”

Soldier braces. “You heard me.” 

“Why would we - we’re giving  _ medicine  _ to the cat,” Captain says, like Soldier doesn’t understand what that is. “That’s the opposite of trying to kill the cat.” 

“I  _ know what medicine is,”  _ Soldier snaps, not letting down his guard. “You’re going to shove it down its throat.”

“We’re not going to  _ hurt _ it,” Captain says. “We just need to figure out a plan to hold it without losing any limbs.” Then his eyes immediately skip to Solder’s left arm. “Ah shit.” 

Soldier actually witnesses, in real time, what it looks like for Captain to be  _ sorry.  _ His giant brown eyebrows hike up his forehead and commune in a forest of wrinkles, his beard scrunching as his mouth turns down at the corners. “Sorry,” he says, eyes huge. “I didn’t mean - I know it’s not a joke. Losing - limbs.” 

Soldier stares at him, incredulous.  _ This  _ is what he repents about? Not the cow, not the goddamn whittling? Of all his vast and varied crimes,  _ this  _ is what Captain chooses to apologize for? 

On the other hand. Most people don’t get upgraded after they lose a limb. And if Soldier lost the use of his metal arm, he’d be pretty goddamn inconvenienced. It’s a big fucking deal for most people, and technically, Soldier is no exception. 

Besides, apologies are a slippery slope. This may well be the start of getting Captain to grovel for other things. 

“I don’t remember,” Soldier says shortly. “Losing it.” Or gaining it, but that’s not the matter at hand here. 

“Oh,” Captain says. “Well. I still shouldn’t have said it.” 

“Sure,” Soldier says, knee deep in discomfort now. 

“Sorry,” Captain says again, like it wasn’t enough the first time. “Shitty thing to happen.” 

Soldier has an agonized moment of wondering just how long he’s gonna drag this out when the cat chooses that moment to exfil directly through Captain’s legs. Soldier is so grateful for the interruption that he doesn’t react fast enough, lunging for it a second too late. Captain grabs hold of it instead.

But instead of chucking the cat out the nearest window Captain just swears and scoops it up, trying to immobilize it by clamping it to his chest. The cat’s having none of it. Before Soldier can distract Captain the cat launches off him and dashes straight for the door. 

Soldier, torn between aiding and abetting the cat and knowing that it probably really does need the drugs, ends up completely failing to catch it. In the end medicating wins out, though by that time the cat has thoroughly mauled both their hands and is spitting at them with demonic vitriol from behind the kitchen chairs. 

The only consolation is that Captain’s done no better. It takes them too long to engage their tactical brains, and even admitting that Captain  _ has _ one pains Soldier though these days he has solid proof. He knows Captain and Widow ran a long-distance op from the barn, but he doesn’t know about what or what on because the sound of Captain’s voice giving orders made it feel like his insides were vibrating so uncomfortably that he had to stage a retreat before even entering the barn. 

“We need chokepoints,” Captain pants, his forearms latticed with scratchmarks. At least that voice is nowhere in evidence now. There’s some scrabbling noises as the cat, currently back under the kitchen table, energetically objects to this statement; Captain looks around, slightly wild around the eyes. “The hallway. We can close the doors at both ends.” 

The short stretch between kitchen and living room does have doors at both ends. Getting the cat into that area is like trying to feed a live rattlesnake into a keyhole. It’s also not a particularly  _ large _ space, so when they do finally corner the damn cat Captain is  _ very much  _ within striking distance, elbows everywhere and looming egregiously. Soldier can smell him, four different kinds of soap with a sweat and toothpaste chaser because he brushes his teeth like a priest doing penance and hasn’t eaten anything yet this morning, and when he says  _ “Aha!”  _ and grabs the cat Soldier flinches back hard enough to knock a chip out of the wall with his metal elbow. 

“You okay?” Captain says, all concern, swiveling around in his crouch and not seeming to notice the foolhardy cat determinedly shredding both his forearms and some of his shoulder. 

_ “Fine,”  _ Soldier grits out. There’s no point resisting; the cat isn’t smart enough to go limp and Captain’s gonna get that medicine into it no matter what. “Let’s get this over with.” 

They get it over with. Soldier has to sacrifice his shirt to trap the cat again, in similar fashion to the towel, but Captain finally gets its head in his giant hand and cautiously squirts the medicine down the cat’s throat. The syringe has no needle, which makes Soldier reevaluate the unpleasantness involved and downgrades the cat to overdramatic whiner. It’s not like it’s having  _ fun,  _ but there aren't even any tubes involved. 

After some more spitting and hissing the cat gets locked in the sitting room, by way of closing the kitchen door on one end and Captain dragging the massive dustridden armchair to block the other end. Soldier’s about to recuse himself for long-distance surveillance just in case Captain decides to punish the cat in private - he doesn’t seem like the type to draw things out but that’s no guarantee - when Captain says, “Where do you think you’re going?” 

Soldier freezes. “Out,” he says tersely. 

“Nope, sit down,” Captain says. “All this needs disinfectant.” 

_All this_ turns out to be the “injuries” they sustained. “It’s a couple of fucking scratches!” Soldier protests, when it turns out that’s all Captain is talking about. 

“Do you  _ know  _ the kind of bacteria that live in a cat’s mouth?” Captain counters. “Besides, blood is a disease vector. Can’t have you oozing all over your clothes before it’s time for your annual wash.” 

There’s an insult there, but Captain’s advancing on him with a bottle and cotton swab and Soldier has to sink his fingers into his thighs to keep still. The way to endure medical treatment is to pretend to be dead already. It works best if you can convince yourself most of all. 

But this time it barely lasts thirty seconds, Captain just turning him slightly to get at the scratches on the back of his shoulderblade, where the cat had clawed its way down his back from over his shoulder. His swipes are practiced and he doesn’t linger, and he only treats the ones on his lower trapezius - where he can’t reach himself, Soldier realizes. 

“Now me,” Captain says when he’s done, handing Soldier a swab and pointing over his shoulder. 

Soldier would rather drop a lemon slice in the antiseptic and drink it with a straw than touch Captain’s giant fucking meat body, but he’s not going to run away from something as small as _this_. He dabs gingerly at the scratches on Captain’s back, half of them on or around the knots and lines of surgical scar tissue crisscrossing the slope of his shoulders like ski trails on Mount Brawn. At least he does until Captain shifts and growls “Come on, what are you doing, high fiving the bacteria back there? Put your back into it,” and Soldier twitches, flushes, then bares his teeth and scrubs vengefully at the red lines. 

“There you go,” Captain says with satisfaction when Soldier flings the pink-stained swab on the kitchen table. “Now do the rest of yours. Don’t forget the one under your ear!” he calls, as Soldier snatches the disinfectant and stomps out of the kitchen. 

-o-

They develop a protocol. Soldier locates, retrieves and immobilizes the cat while Captain administers the medication. This requires them to stand very close to each other. The cat inevitably inflicts superficial damage upon one of them, but usually Captain, because he does not have a metal arm. When released, the cat scrabbles back to whatever secure location it’s decided to hide under that will fit both cat and cone. 

Captain starts attempting to incentivize the cat with treats in exchange for cooperation, but it’s too intelligent for that and won’t eat from his hand. Inexplicably, Captain doesn’t stop trying. Soldier maintains his surveillance, but it’s becoming increasingly goddamn obvious that Captain is either too naive, well-meaning or stupid to inflict any kind of corrective action on the cat, no matter how much it makes him bleed. He even comes back from buying groceries one day with a brightly colored stuffed rodent on a string, a gift which the cat summarily ignores; the toy looks like something pooped out by a clown and when squeezed gives up sad, wheezy little squeaks. When the building fell on Captain it  _ definitely  _ gave him brain damage. 

Soldier almost messages the Widow, once, before discarding that option as no use. There’s no way to confirm Captain’s stance on punishment without seeming weak, even if he explains it’s not about  _ him,  _ it’s about the cat - that’s even worse. He thinks about phrasing it as an update on Captain’s continued descent into madness, but since Widow seems to find it beyond amusing, there’s probably no point to that either. She’ll just send him a  _ :)  _ again. 

So Soldier ends up in a fruitless orbit of surveillance, closer to the house than he’d like, watching for something that increasingly seems about as likely as a direct meteorite strike on this farm. Then, to add insult to injury, a rainstorm blows in and then shows zero inclination to blow back out again. And the barn isn’t fully rainproof. 

Soldier holds out until evening, because he’s read all the books in the house that aren’t the goddamn bible (he’s starting to suspect the copies are reproducing somehow in the dusty recesses around the couch) and if he ventures close to the house Captain will bully him into checkers or poker or motherfucking napkin-and-marker hangman. The earliest they can go to the library is the day after tomorrow, because  _ apparently  _ it’s closed on Sundays. The barn offers little in the way of engagement and currently not much of shelter, either: all the cats are clustered up in the dryest section - the corner claimed by the revolting cow - and to have adequately dry bedding Soldier would have to displace them. 

There are some squelching sounds from outside. Captain appears at the mouth of the barn, wearing his horrible waders slouched around his waist and holding the big metal bowl of cat food. He’s also holding an umbrella printed to look like a frog. 

“Evening, champ,” he says cheerily, reaching up to wedge the bowl up on the second level next to the cats. “What’re we gonna make for dinner?’

“Nothing,” Soldier mutters. The umbrella’s dead eyes stare at him, froggily. 

“Too bad,” Captain says. “Come on. In the house, let’s go.” 

Crossing the clearing is enough to soak Soldier to the bone, which makes Captain tsk at him in the mudroom.  _ “You  _ wanted me in here,” Soldier snaps, waving his arm at the water puddling beneath his boots. 

“You could have joined me under the umbrella,” Captain points out, shuffling out of the waders. “I held it out for you.”

_ I would not stand under an umbrella with you if the sky were raining lava and in any case if it were THAT umbrella I especially would run out and happily burn  _ is too long to say, so Soldier has to settle for yanking off his sopping shirt and chucking it at the pile of Captain’s shoes. He should have stayed in his tac jacket. It’s almost waterproof. More waterproof than the civilian shirt, definitely. Captain tsks over that too, picking it up, wringing it out over the back step and hanging it up on one of the mudroom coat hooks to dry. 

“You should take a bath,” he says, nodding up the stairs. “Hot water heater’s actually pretty decent. I’ll have dinner done by the time you’re out.” 

“I’m not taking a  _ bath.”  _

“A shower, then. Come on, you’re muddy from the elbows down. Or tomorrow we’ll have to go buy mops and go over the whole house and make sure we got all the dirt and damp out of the floorboards. Maybe get some sealant too. Hey, maybe we’ll do that anyway -”

“I’m going! I’m fucking going!” 

Captain grins as Soldier stomps up the stairs. “Don’t forget to take your boots off, champ!”

Soldier stomps louder. He’ll put his boots  _ wherever he god damn wants.  _

-o-

The next morning is cool and misty, and Captain breaks from his normal routine. Soldier didn’t sleep - the guest room is completely unsecurable - but he did take a forty-minute rest period sitting in the most defensible corner between the wall and the bed, and when he rouses he realizes Captain is not in the house. 

The search only lasts a minute, because the bastard is in the patch of grass out back, barefoot and wearing only his sleeping shorts and undershirt. He appears to be doing someone’s closest approximation of tai chi, if that someone had only ever seen tai chi performed from eight thousand yards away through a pair of opera glasses. It’s like watching a construction crane try to do yoga. 

Soldier considers the likelihood of a psychotic break, first for Captain and then for himself. Unfortunately there is probably no applicable psychological testing scale for either of them, Soldier due to his optimizations and Captain due to being a fucking alien from goddamn Mars. Whatever inscrutable ritual he’s executing is probably immune to any kind of intervention. 

Soldier leaves his surveillance post in disgust and goes to ingest some apples off the overgrown orchard trees. When he comes back to the house, however, Captain is still fucking there, doing still more incomprehensible things. This time he’s - wrestling the bristles off a wooden broom.

Now he’s filling two buckets with water. And tying the denuded broomstick to the handles. What the fuck is he going to do with - he’s lifting it. And putting it back down again. He’s just lifting it. Up and down and up and down and - Oh, now he’s lifting it a  _ different  _ way. Jesus  _ christ.  _

And it doesn’t stop. Soldier keeps waiting for Captain to come to his senses and go make his appalling yogurt breakfast, but he just keeps  _ going _ . He gets on the ground and does pushups - at first stiffly, slowly, but then he speeds up. He does lunges. He does squats. He’s stiff, his balance is off, he favors his left leg heavily, but he just keeps doing it. He runs through a whole catalogue of calisthenics, at one point even  _ going into the orchard  _ and  _ doing pull-ups from a tree. Soldier’s  _ tree. This is  _ harassment.  _

After that he finally goes inside the farmhouse, but only to gulp down approximately a gallon of water and demolish a cold omelet that had been sitting on the stove. Soldier hadn’t even noticed it this morning. If he had he would have fucking eaten it, as retribution for Captain  _ clearly  _ losing what’s left of his mind and abandoning his custodial duties. And now he’s right back out there again, doing  _ more  _ pushups. He’s like some kind of perpetual motion machine run on demonic influence and sweat.  

This bullshit continues for  _ the entire goddamn day.  _ It’s evening when Soldier finally snaps. Captain’s sweaty, heaving body ambles to the greenhouse trough and glistens aggressively while Captain splashes water on his face and Soldier struggles not to do something drastic like run over there and slap him one hundred thousand times.

Captain takes his shirt off, dunks it in the water and wrings it out. He turns his face to the fading sunlight and closes his eyes, by all available indicators at peace with the universe. The evening light turns him lavender and gold, his muscles bulging like socks full of bowling balls. 

This is  _ unbearable.  _ It’s - indecent. Soldier whirls and abandons his post, this time determined to do something - something drastic. He doesn’t know what but he’s gonna do it. Burn all Captain’s clothes - no, no. Burn the farm down. No. Too crude. Clumsy. That’s as good as admitting Captain has won, in this psychological war of subtlety. Captain is clearly trying to get him to break. He  _ won’t.  _ He is going to  _ turn these tables.  _

Soldier, buoyed by righteous vengeance, stomps upstairs and shoves into Captain’s stupid bedroom, and only hesitates a second before throwing himself on the bed, boots very much still on. That’ll show him. Gallivanting  _ bastard.  _

He’s so high on vindicated fury that it takes him nearly fifteen seconds to recognize the sheets he’s lying on are strawberry print. 

Captain bought strawberry sheets. The bastard  _ bought strawberry sheets.  _ They are  _ new,  _ he can  _ smell it,  _ Captain is  _ making fun of him  _ with  _ everything in the house down to the linens closet.  _

Soldier is all set to find some kerosene and just burn these fucking fruit abominations to the ground after all when he realizes that’s  _ just  _ what Captain wants. It’s all just playing into his hands. This is just like the straw effigy. He’ll just make it all one big joke. 

Well, he  _ won’t be able to this time.  _ Soldier got to it first. He’s going to  _ ruin  _ Captain’s little game and get the last fucking word on this asshole. He angrily swaddles himself in the sheets, teeth bared in savage anticipation. Oh, these are just  _ so  _ comfortable,  _ Captain.  _ Oh, the print is  _ so lovely,  _ they’re  _ just the thing.  _ For  _ me?  _ You  _ shouldn’t have… _

Soldier arranges himself in a position of supine bliss - without compromising bodily security, of course - and slams his eyes shut. When Captain comes in he will pretend to wake up, and yawn and stretch with all the insolence he can muster, and he will hear the chorus of angels at the look on Captain’s face when he sees his own tactics turned against him. 

-o-

Steve, upon sallying forth from his post-workout shower, was not expecting to find Soldier curled up in his bed in the world’s angriest nap ball, but there he is. Steve hitches the towel around his waist and cautiously comes in for a closer look. 

The kid’s well and fully asleep. Steve  _ really  _ wasn’t expecting  _ that.  _ Soldier haunts the property at night with no regard for doors, windows or any other markers of boundary, but Steve’s bedroom isn’t exactly his favorite place, save for those couple of brief incidents of night stalking. Even Natasha didn’t sleep in Steve’s bed until she moved out of his apartment, and even then only as a power tactic to exile him to the guest bedroom and steal his comforter until the next time he visited her place and won it back again. 

Well, as long as the kid’s getting some sleep, Steve’s not going to question it. Steve should probably go get dressed in the guest room and give Soldier space, but his leg aches and the knee pin particularly is giving him shit and he feels personally victimized by the thought of going back down the stairs. Besides, Soldier’s the one who took  _ his  _ bed. And it’s a queen. 

Maybe the kid’s got some preternatural attraction to strawberries. Steve bought the sheets on a whim two days ago on his grocery run, admittedly chuckling a little to himself as he thought of Soldier in his voluminous granny shorts; he didn’t figure on deliberately showing them off, though he did think they’d be a nice touch if it ever came up. Soldier might make him another effigy. 

On second thought, maybe Steve should check him for fever. 

He’s really not sure which way he’d prefer this to go. On the one hand, part of him definitely feels like Soldier needs to be rolled into a quilt and sat on for a while. If Steve can get him to sleep in a bed, that’s got to be better than bunking in hay, at least for his back if not anything else. 

On the other hand, it’s Steve’s bed. And he’s in it. 

Well. If Soldier didn’t want a bedmate, he shouldn’t have gotten in someone else’s bed. Steve folds himself down on the available half of the mattress with a faint groan. Soldier doesn’t even stir, which makes Steve lean over to check that he’s still breathing. Huh. Must be working off some serious sleep-dep. 

Satisfied with proof of life, Steve settles back and flicks off the nightstand lamp. Either way he doesn’t expect this situation to last long. Soldier will either snap awake and bug out twenty minutes in or realize that sleeping in the barn alone is not always preferable to bunking on an actual mattress, even if it Involves someone’s sweaty elbow in your kidney all night. Natasha had gone the first way; Bucky, back in the war, had gone the second. And Steve’s been on plenty of field exercises with trainees, and while none of them really fell into the “child soldier” category, enough were coming out of bad situations that Steve feels qualified to make the assessment. 

-o-

Steve wakes the next morning with what feels like a bag of forks wrapped around his ribs. He peels one eye open and swivels it down. He takes back everything he thought last night about Soldier having good bed manners. This is just like every time Bucky would wheedle his way into Steve’s bunk, swearing he’d keep to his side. As if there was enough space to have  _ sides  _ in an Army cot. 

Steve shuts his eye again. “Buddy,” he mutters. “If you don’t get your hand out of my boxers, I’m calling Animal Control.” 

“I can take ‘em,” Soldier mumbles. Then he jerks, rips his hand out of Steve’s boxers like he’s been burned, lurches out of the bed, trips on the lamp cord, has to spin to recover and ends up splayed against the dresser. He gives Steve a look highly reminiscent of Munch’s The Scream and launches himself out the window. 

“...Wow,” Steve says into the empty room. “I  _ definitely  _ need to call Animal Control.”

He scratches at his stomach, manfully wills down his semi-erection - definitely on the mend; he hasn’t had a stiffy in months, even if he’s mildly concerned that  _ that  _ little performance was sufficient enough to bring it back - and rolls over for another fifteen minutes of shuteye. 

On his way downstairs he glances out the window. Soldier’s facedown in the trough again. Steve leaves him to his therapeutic behaviors and goes to fry up some sausage. 

-o-

Lying in the water and listening to the horrible bugs screaming in the trees reminds him there are worse things than temporarily losing control of your faculties. So he… touched… Captain’s… body. So what. So what!  _ Captain  _ clearly doesn’t care. He’s eating his breakfast and prodding his game of colored squares. He probably doesn’t even remember it. He was nearly not awake at all. And Soldier’s probably going to forget this too. He’s  _ better.  _

Soldier spends the morning deep in the orchard, glaring at wasps and picking apples by way of throwing knife. Captain’s probably doing something astonishingly stupid again. Soldier grimly refuses to contemplate the depths of that foxhole and focuses on nailing wasps to the tree one by one via accelerated long distance knifepoint. If he goes too far down that hole he’ll end up self-medicating by shoving every weed he finds into his mouth in hopes of finding a poisonous one that might knock him out for a couple of hours. 

In the end, however, the growing hollowness of his stomach drives him back to the farm; he can’t afford to let nutritional deficiencies compromise his operational efficiency. He rounds the barn - only to walk into the fucking bullshit  _ right over again.  _ The buckets are no longer enough for Captain Idiot. He’s in jeans,  _ just  _ jeans, and he’s taping up his hands. Then he scuffs his palms together, walks over to the truck, gets a grip under the bumper, and lifts it up. 

This happens three more times, Soldier staring, aghast, before Captain visibly decides he is unsatisfied with whatever the fuck he’s getting out of manhandling a car. Then he goes over to the barn. 

Soldier has a dreadful vertiginous moment of precognition where he just  _ knows  _ Captain is going to come out with Bessie laid out over his shoulders and start doing squats like  _ that,  _ but what actually happens is arguably worse. There’s something like a rusted engine block in the barn, though whatever vehicle it came out of must have been modern car’s megalodonian prehistoric cousin, and Captain - comes out dragging it. 

Oh, no. Captain, gleaming with sweat, bulging distractingly, maneuvers the block to the center of the open patch of grass. Captain braces himself. Soldier does too, metal fingers biting into the wooden edge of the barn wall. Captain squats, his chest expanding enormously as he gets his breath, and in one swift motion he heaves the block up.

If Soldier were not a perfected asset with no uncontrolled reactions, he might have let out a sound and that sound could arguably have been described as a squeak. Captain huffs, balancing the engine block overhead, then cackles under his breath and drops it, stepping smartly out of its way. The block lands with a  _ CHUNK,  _ its weight sinking it three inches deep in the dirt. Soldier’s breath whooshes out. 

But then Captain squats down again. He gets his grip  _ again.  _ And he lifts it  _ again.  _

And again. And again. 

After fifteen minutes of this, Soldier realizes he needs to go away and find a bathroom. 

There is only one bathroom on the premises and it is in the farmhouse. So be it. Captain has shown he is in no danger of harming himself and Soldier would not be able to render any assistance anyway, not in his current state. 

There is not a single surface in this bathroom that is not covered in doilies. Mummified flowers are shoved in at least two faded porcelain vases. The rug looks like it was excavated from a tomb. An ancient, framed page of what looks like parchment made out of real animal skin informs him that  _ if you sprinkle when you tinkle, be a sweetie and wipe the seatie!  _

Luckily Soldier is an expert at operating under grueling conditions. He looks down at his pants. The bathroom situation has abated slightly, but just the thought of Captain out there lifting  _ things  _ over his head is enough bring it roaring back again.

There’s nothing for it. Soldier unzips his pants. Sometimes it’s necessary to manually remove interfering stimuli.  

He’s not going to dignify this with any kind of term like  _ arousal.  _ He’s pretty sure his body has just run out of ways to express rage. That’s gotta be it. And - so what. Soldier can lift things. He can pick up a car too. Captain’s not special. He’s just a  _ giant,  _ a, a  _ freak,  _ and he - he held the cat, the injured cat, he didn’t shake it or throw it or hurt it even when it kept clawing and biting him over and over. Soldier finds himself overtaken by vicious, violent thoughts like  _ why does he have so many freckles  _ and  _ why does the sugar spoon look so small when he’s holding it  _ and  _ he just PICKED UP A CAR  _ and  _ if I lay down and looked heavy would he pick me up too - _

The door opens. Soldier flails wildly, one hand caught in his fatigues, kicking the cabinet in and knocking one of the vases and at least seventeen doilies to the floor in a series of escalating crashes. “Whoa,” Captain’s voice says, then he  _ sticks his head around the door,  _ and only when he  _ fucking makes eye contact  _ does he stop.

They stare at each other, Soldier wedged into the corner, frozen. Having your hand stuck down your pants isn’t a recognized stress position  _ but it sure fucking feels like it should be.  _

"I - can close this if you want," Captain says, indicating the door.

_ “Fucking yes,”  _ Soldier howls, then immediately changes his mind and barges out the door. 

-o-

Steve listens to Soldier thunder down the hall and, by the sounds of it, directly out the bedroom window. There’s a more distant thump as he lands on the farmhouse roof. 

Well, nobody’s at their best when unexpectedly caught polishing their rifle. Steve looks down. Ancient magazines are all over the bathroom, some still spilling out of the broken cabinet in a tide of faded paper. Right on the toilet is an old clothing catalogue, left by whatever previous occupant decided that mauve and lime were good colors for floral wallpaper. It’s open on a page showing a smiling white lady in lingerie, standing in a stiffly posed way and showing off her tall hair and pointy bra. The text next to her informs him that the bra is a Four-Way Magic Clasp and that it comes in three classic colors.

Steve slowly shakes his head. He’s gotta get the kid some porn. 

-o-

Soldier spends the next twenty-four hours swearing a blood oath to never set foot in the house again. The cats watch him from around the barn, loafing little bastards that they are. The one Captain calls Froggy occasionally wanders over to repeatedly headbutt Soldier’s leg and extort bodily attention. Soldier needs to think of Captain as a kind of blundering two-legged cat:  _ Froggy  _ certainly doesn’t know or care about nudity, and Captain’s at about the same level. 

The next day Soldier holds out until mid-afternoon, but in the end caves and infiltrates the farmhouse to steal some water that doesn’t taste like nature. He reminds himself that Captain assuredly does not care about anything Soldier has below the waist or what he might do with it. He is not a handler; he is just some… person… who lives here and does things and happens to feed Soldier and some cats. 

He has almost completely successfully blocked out the contents of yesterday’s events and he is doing his damnedest to make this happy state continue. 

He would sooner tickle his balls with a cactus than talk to Captain, but then the decision is taken out of his hands. On his way out he comes across Captain crouched over what looks like a wifi router, holding a hammer and a fistful of ethernet cables. Soldier has to literally stop in the doorway to get a full visual on the scene that is happening in front of him. 

“Oh, hey,” Captain says, glancing around. He does not look like he has any memory of anything he may or may not have seen in the bathroom yesterday morning. “Had breakfast yet?” 

“Why are you holding a hammer,” Soldier says, braced for literally anything to be the answer. 

Captain looks at the hammer. “I’m setting up the internet,” he says. 

“Why the  _ fuck  _ are you using a  _ hammer.”  _

“I think this wire thing isn’t in all the way,” Captain explains, without really explaining anything. He scratches his temple with the ethernet cables, wincing when he accidentally pokes himself in the eye. 

Soldier blows out a slow and steadying breath that ends in a hiss. “Move over,” he orders. “Bring me your laptop.”

“It’s in the box,” Captain says, pointing once again with the hammer at a bag that has BEST VALUE! printed on it. 

“I don't understand why I keep having to repeat myself,” Soldier says.

Captain rolls his eyes, but creaks to his feet and lugs over the laptop box. Soldier manages to form a defensive perimeter around the router in that time, protecting it from whatever the fuck else Stone Age shit Captain might try to inflict on it. 

Captain waggles the box at him. “Just put it here,” Soldier says shortly. “And go away.”

“You know how to set up internet?” Captain says bemusedly. 

“Better than  _ you  _ do.  _ Out.”  _

Captain, grinning, goes out. Soldier waits and then does a quick perimeter check of the kitchen windows to make sure Captain isn’t lurking just out of sight and laughing at him. Then he turns to the router. He  _ is  _ going to set it up. Having internet access in this hellhole will only be an advantage. 

It takes some figuring, untangling all the wires Captain fucked with - was he fucking knitting with this ethernet cord? Was he using it as a goddamn cat toy? - but he gets the hardware on and blinking. He knew there was a landline connection - had to be, given the goddamn spider-infested box in the “outhouse” - but that must be bugged to hell and back. And not only literally. Ha ha. 

Soldier sorts through what he’s got. He can set up a satellite link, probably, if he can rig an antenna and give it enough juice. 

He knows damn well how to set up ad hoc communications arrays, and the process is not engaging enough to stop his thoughts wandering while he works. He could use this to - make contact. Check in. He’s been AWOL for nearly a month. 

He turns on the computer.

But maybe Captain’s ineptitude was a ruse, a trap to see what he’d do if given access to technology. Soldier’s probably being monitored right now. He accesses the pre-boot sequence, digging into the back end of the operating system and pulling up the command line. He - hesitates. 

Is it even worth it. There’s a very real chance this could significantly compromise him, given how insecure his methods here would have to be and the possibility of Captain leaving him alone like this as a trap. And with what Widow’s been doing - who would even respond? And what orders would Soldier have no choice but to carry out if they did? 

He closes out of the command line and boots the laptop normally. It’s not safe to make contact with HYDRA. He can’t do that right now. It would be an unacceptable risk.

He grits his teeth and starts jabbing his way through the damn civilian OS setup. 

-o-

Steve comes back from his new PT workout half expecting Soldier to be wiring remote detonators in the kitchen. Natasha had once “fixed” the SHIELD senior agent break room coffee machine - in plain sight, on the table, during a staff meeting, nobody saying anything because she was the Widow - and while she  _ had  _ fixed it she had also programmed it to spray boiling coffee at three STRIKE agents and those three agents only. Nobody could figure out how she’d installed facial recognition or biometrics or whatever on a  _ Keurig  _ in a  _ staff meeting  _ under the eyes of Hill, Fury and Captain America himself, but nobody could figure out how to undo it either and eventually the machine had to be thrown away.

Steve never did find out what those three had done to anger Natasha, because one was killed on the next mission he took, another quit, and the third requested reassignment guarding a research station in Norway. Maybe he’ll ask her one day. 

In the meantime, he’s kind of looking forward to finding out what Soldier’s done. 

He does hope the kid  _ also  _ just set up plain old internet, at least. Steve left his personal laptop and most of his things at his DC apartment, which Sam is currently housesitting and probably wallpapering with blurry black and white hobby photos of birds, and Steve hadn’t seen much need to wire the farm for internet given he had his satellite phone and local library. Also, fucking around with wires when he was still in an arm and leg cast sounded both exhausting and like a fast way to burn the fucking house down. 

The kid definitely needs more personal entertainment than Steve can offer, though. 

He pushes open the kitchen door to see what kind of bomb squad wiring SkyNet Soldier’s managed to build unsupervised and finds, instead, a normal blinking router and the perfectly unmolested laptop, open on the kitchen table. Soldier is apathetically making his way through its initial setup, whacking the enter key every few seconds to get through the prompts.

“You wired everything?” Steve says, impressed. “There’s a landline here?” 

Soldier grunts. “Satellite.” 

Unfortunately Steve  _ does  _ know some things about satellites. “... Whose?” 

“Who cares,” Soldier says, in the least reassuring tone of voice possible. 

“Alright, well,” Steve says, deciding that’s a problem for Future Steve. “Here’s what the internet is for.” 

He opens a browser window and types in  _ pornhub.  _ Then, while that loads - pretty damn slowly, but Steve supposes you can’t expect much from West Virginian internet satellites - he opens another tab and types in  _ my body, myself free pdf version.  _ Then he swivels the laptop to face Soldier. 

“Here you go, champ,” he says. “All yours. Just remember to wash your hands before and after and sanitize everything that’s gonna get used internally.” 

_ “What?”  _

Steve checks the time on his phone. “I’m gonna go drive to the store for the next… let’s say… hour thirty, so just make sure everything’s cleaned up by then. And if you have any questions, just type them into that there Google search bar. It’ll have all the answers and more, I promise.” 

He leaves Soldier sitting there, gaping at him in affronted outrage like the cats do when he dares to reclaim his tuna sandwiches from their thieving paws, and heads for the truck. Maybe he should make it two hours just in case. 

-o-

When he gets back everything is more or less as he left it, but Soldier’s disappeared again and there’s no sign of the laptop. Steve decides the kid is smart enough to figure out what was the right kind of sex ed intel and isn’t currently somewhere outside sticking his dick in a wasp nest or something, so Steve can go ahead and safely make lunch. 

The next morning the phone rings. It’s the actual landline, not his cell, so it takes Steve a wild minute to figure out where the fuck that noise blaring through four separate rooms is coming from. When he finally finds it he wavers, staring at the ancient yellowing kitchen handset like it’s roadkill. He didn’t even know the thing was functional. Fatalistically, he picks up the phone.

“Hello,” he says.

“Steven,” a man says, so gravely that Steve’s heart stops a full five seconds as scenarios filled with barreling trucks and men in black tac suits closing in around the perimeter of his barn go whistling through his head. 

Then he squints. “Tony? _ ” _

“Not that I don’t appreciate you finally reaching out in the only way you seem to know how - which excitingly involves piggybacking  _ my satellite  _ and not picking up your  _ cell phone  _ and  _ dialing me,  _ but look. I’m not mad. I’m not even  _ disappointed _ . I guess you could say I’m a little  _ baffled _ , because… ‘Double Hammock’? 10 hours curtains ASMR? Platoon Lagoon III: Slime Vengeance, which, may I note, you paid twelve whole dollars for on Amazon Prime? Steven. Please. Wait, wait, I haven't finished, although I hope you did-”

“Just get on with it.”

“Ten Ways to Carve a Swing? Fun With Tires? I Take My Baby To A Forest Clearing and Guess What We Do? No, I really want you to guess.”

“Fuck?” Steve says, resigned. 

“ _ No, Steven,”  _ Tony says with relish. “ _ Two hours  _ of  _ whittling.  _ Are you secretly a hobbit?”

“So you... watched all of these,” Steve says, attempting to rally against the waist-high tide of chatter.

“You think I have that kind of time? No. Though I gotta say The Lumberjack's Haul is actually pretty good. The ten minutes I saw of it, at least. Probably put me on some kind of watch list, but hey, what’s another one. But that’s not the point. The point is, Steven, there is a truly appalling amount of porn in your internet history right now. Thirty four sites. Six hundred and twenty two videos. I don't  _ understand _ the amount of porn you've watched, and  _ I'm  _ on the Top Ten list of celebrity stars on eighteen of those websites. Are you okay?”

Steve, now staring unseeing out the kitchen window, says, “Debatable.”

“I’m not kinkshaming! I don’t kinkshame on principle. Well, also because ‘Bear Hugs by Bare Bears’ doesn’t actually have any sex in it. It definitely  _ feels  _ a little kinky, but that’s not  _ bad  _ \- ”

“Tony.”

“- totally fine, and frankly, I’m  _ way  _ more concerned about your new habit of spending hours googling yourself.” 

“What?”

“Seriously, Cap, if you wanted the pap shots of every party you’ve ever been to you should’ve just contacted the photographers direct. They’d give you the really high res versions.”

“What.”

“Anyway, I just wanted to drop a line and say I support you. Call if you need more bandwidth. Or specialty clubs. Is this why you moved to West Virginia?” 

Steve hangs up the phone.

Thirty seconds later his cell phone pings with an incoming text. It’s a website for a “specialized sex addictions” help meetings and hotline. Steve puts down the phone and puts his hand over his eyes. 

[](https://www.flickr.com/photos/160995661@N05/46735400134/in/dateposted-public/)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you to anoneknewmoose for appearing in this film as dr meadows the horse doctor, a treasure and a gem


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AGGRESSIVEWHENSTARTLED, YOU ARE A HERO. A BLESSING. A GEM
> 
> QUIETNIGHT, WHAT DID WE DO TO DESERVE YOU. A HUNDRED PAST LIVES OF PUPPYSAVING MINIMUM.

He can’t find Soldier all day, which previously would’ve meant the kid was sulking and now probably means he’s jerking off. Or… whatever it is he’s doing with those hammock and lumberjack videos. But if there’s one thing Soldier will dependably turn up for, it’s getting antibiotics into a hellish little fleaball with the brain of a stuffed walnut. 

Maybe this  _ is  _ something he has to talk to the kid about. After all, watching hours upon hours of blue movies isn’t healthy, even if your definition of blue movie isn’t quite the same as everyone else’s. 

Sounds pretty uncomfortable, actually. 

Then again, Soldier  _ is  _ a grown man and by all accounts a highly competent professional. He’s… probably not jacking his dick into some kind of medical problem. 

Steve decides that no, he doesn’t really want to have an educational conversation as to the mechanics of personal intimacy no matter how hilarious it’d be, at least not unless absolutely necessary. That’s what giving him internet was for in the first place. Steve doesn’t know if Soldier knows about the cold shower method - or showers in general - but figures that either way that’s something he’ll have to find out about on his own. 

He does, however, want to tell the kid that Tony Goddamn Stark is watching over his metaphorical shoulder while he watches his personal videos. That’s not something a fella keeps to himself. It’s doubtful that Soldier can figure out some kind of security that Tony’s algorithms can’t crack, but he can at least erase his search history and use a VPN. Maybe just use another linkup altogether. 

Soldier shows up just as Steve’s pulling on the oven mitts, which now do double duty against both chickens and cat. He seems unusually perturbed, sneaking glances at Steve from the corner of his eye and responding to Steve’s cheery greeting with a mumble instead of an insult or even grunt. Maybe in his googling he saw those pictures from when those nice girls from Victorian Secret or whatever it was talked him into doing the showgirl trick and lifting his bike with all of them on it in the gala parking lot. 

Well, at least Steve’s about to ruin any good moods. “So that satellite uplink you hooked up,” he says as they advance on the cat, cornered and hissing prodigiously. “How - secure is it?”

“Commercial,” Soldier grunts, grabbing it. “High traffic. Pay-to-access channels. Very little risk.” 

“Right. Solid logic,” Steve says as the cat, undeterred by its previous failures, determinedly continues its attempts to disembowel Soldier’s arm. “Thing is, Tony Stark happens to be the kind of guy who monitors his satellite traffic personally.” 

_ “What.”  _

“At least if it’s coming out of West Virginia.” 

_ “Who.” _

“Tony. Stark of Stark Industries. He called me this morning. Wanted to let me know that according to my search history I need to be seeing approximately four different therapists,” Steve says helpfully.  

_ “What?”  _

“So I just wanted to give you a heads up and let you know to use a VPN or something.” 

“He,” Soldier says. He’s still holding the cat in front of him, but whatever he’s looking at seems to be issuing from some private universe vastly more horrible than this one. “What. Did he tell you.” 

“To get therapy,” Steve repeats. It probably wouldn't help anything if he mentions he got a brief rundown of what Soldier’d been looking at. “And to stop googling myself. Though I’m pretty sure he still thinks I think that means something unprintable.” 

Soldier appears to be going through some kind of harrowing inner journey. Steve considers what it’d be like if Tony Stark called a housemate about  _ his  _ private personal time browsing and fully sympathizes. “Maybe try another satellite altogether,” he suggests. “He can be pretty paranoid.” 

Luckily the cat chooses that moment to somersault out of their hands, interrupting Soldier's inevitable spiral into the inherent privacy violations built into this modern reality. “Thank god,” Steve mutters to himself as Soldier dashes after it. “That cat is my favorite.”

-o-

Soldier doesn’t know what the fuck to think anymore. Looking up the Captain online had been a mistake. Hooking up  _ internet  _ had been a mistake. The Stark Industries satellite connection was vast, thoroughly commercial and exceedingly corporate, the kind of thing monitored by apathetic sysadmins and half-coded bots. The goddamn  _ company namesake  _ wasn’t supposed to - to  _ call the Captain  _ and  _ tell him to get therapy.  _

At least this proves he was right to be cautious and leave off contacting HYDRA. 

He shouldn’t have gone online at all. At first he decided to get back at Captain and rig the laptop to nonstop play some truly disgusting video, but the internet he had access to was completely unrestricted and the resulting stream of options was like being blasted with a firehose. He had gotten distracted. And then he’d had the  _ amazing  _ idea of looking up Captain online. 

That had been the biggest mistake of all. Not only because there were whole  _ galleries  _ of photographs with captions like  _ "Commander Rogers with Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders", "Commander Rogers with Dallas Cowboys" _ and  _ "Commander Rogers lifting linebackers S. Lee and J. Smith over his head",  _ but because there were - other photos. Older photos. He hadn’t clicked on any of those, the black and white ones. It had felt too much like poking some sleeping monster with a stick. Soldier’s not  _ afraid  _ of course _ ,  _ but he’s not dumb enough to rouse trouble when he doesn’t have to.   

And Captain outright  _ told  _ him when someone was monitoring his use. Could be good cop bad cop. Trying to gain his trust. But if there’s one thing that has been comprehensively proven, it’s that the most nefarious thing Captain wants from him is cleaning the chicken coop. 

He has to think about this logically. Captain is a SHIELD operative. Soldier remembers him. Bits of him. They ran ops together. The rational conclusion is that Captain is also HYDRA, but - everything in Soldier rebels against that answer. 

Besides, Captain would have recognized him if they’d worked together. 

Unless he’d been wiped too. Soldier growls in frustration and yanks some grass out of the ground. He doesn’t know of any other operatives who have undergone the procedures he has, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. But then  _ why the fuck is Captain out here.  _ The HYDRA severance package isn’t a nice farm in the woods. The medical “leave” situation isn’t either. The only people who might get this kind of treatment would be very high up, but that’s definitely not in play here. Captain might have been commander of all ops but he sure as hell isn’t anymore, and his influence out here is zero.

Maybe he defected from HYDRA. Like Widow. Defected and lived. 

Widow’s been going through HYDRA ops like a chainsaw through chiffon lingerie. He didn’t want to think it, couldn’t think it, but the things she showed him - the names and places she wrote, the codes, the leaks and plans on the notebook paper they burned - she’s gone deep. She’s peeling HYDRA command like an onion. She has others helping her. She said, soon, she’d want him to help do it too. 

He doesn’t see how he can refuse. He’s - going to have to be a double agent. Triple agent. However many fucking… layers there end up being. He doesn’t  _ want  _ to. He’s shocked by the depth of feeling, appalled at how, how  _ childish _ he’s being, but he  _ can’t fucking stop. _ He’s the  _ fist of fucking HYDRA. _ He doesn’t  _ get  _ to say  _ I don’t want to. _

He’s furious all over again, feeling like his skin might bubble with it. This kind of confusion can only be deliberate, the whole situation designed to upend him, but - he just can’t fucking see how that can be true. 

The one thing he knows for certain is that whatever’s coming, he’s not ready. He’s gotten soft. He’s not going rabid with lack of things to do anymore, but in all this space he’s unraveling instead. Everything’s coming apart. He can hardly stand to have the fatigues touch his skin anymore. He’s falling asleep at odd times, all over the place, like Captain does. Like he’s been busted up too and his body is too busy knitting together to even keep its eyes open. 

And it feels wrong to be away from Captain, or at least not know where he is. It’s not like target tracking. It’s the closest thing he’s felt to a mission imperative but at the same time nothing like it. And it’s _ stupid.  _ It feels like having critical intel to report, time-sensitive, only the intel is something stupid like  _ i made another voodoo doll of you do you want to watch me stab it. We can make eye contact this time.  _

It’s all tied into the, the memories, the horrible fractured familiarity. Lines and fishhooks jerking with nothing at the end of it. Is this just old programming. Is it - something else. Is it some cosmic fucking connection to a past life or a psychic doppelganger or god knows fucking what. 

But he _knows_ it’s not right. It’s like being a radio on the fritz, picking up signals from some other station. Barnes. Bucky. _Bullshit._ It’s all fucking - soup, one big bubbling bullshit brain soup. 

His hair hangs in his face. His metal arm glints in the moonlight. Captain calls him  _ champ _ like it’s a codename he should already know. 

He’s sick of it.  _ All  _ of it. Something has got to give. 

-o-

The next day Steve greets the world post-nap by going outside and finding Soldier sitting next to the vegetable patch, sawing at his hair with one of his knives. He really, really hopes it’s not because Soldier got lube in it. “Lice gotten to you?” Steve calls on his way to the henhouse. 

“Too  _ hot,”  _ Soldier growls. 

“Fair enough.” Steve goes inside, makes his tea and brings it back out on the porch. He sips and watches Soldier achieve progressively shorter bangs, nick himself thrice and finally throw the knife at the ground in exhausted frustration. His hair looks like a dandelion that’s been smacked a couple times against a wall. 

“Need any help?” Steve says. 

Soldier looks over at him like he wishes the knife was still in his hand. _ “No.”  _

“I cut my own hair,” Steve tells the yard at large, sipping his tea. “Gotten pretty good at it. Of course, I use scissors.” 

Soldier draws two more knives. 

“ _ Not  _ like that,” Steve says, momentarily forgetting to be nonchalant in the face of basic kindergarten safety measures. Soldier makes a frustrated bleating noise and chucks down these knives too. All three of them stick up from the ground like a sad tableau to hairdressing failure. Steve risks a fortifying sip of tea before putting the mug down on the porch railing. “Hold on a second. I got scissors inside.”

They’re not even that rusted, which is better than what Steve was expecting. He snags the scissors, and also grabs a clean dishtowel, a razor, a pitcher of water and a shiny tin tray. He figures if he’s adding “barber” to the list of roles he’s unexpectedly adopted on a whim after thawing out of the ice, he might as well commit to detail. 

When Steve carries the whole load out with him, Soldier’s sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest. His hair poofs out around his head in a frizzy cloud. It looks like a mop that got caught in a paper shredder.

“Never had to cut my own hair before,” he says sullenly as Steve lays out the materials on the railing beside him, which sounds enough like an excuse that Soldier must have a pretty good idea of what he looks like. 

“Well, most people usually don’t,” Steve says. “I’m just cheap and I don’t dress to impress. Although,” he continues, wiping the scissors off on the dishtowel, “one time a kid stuck a piece of chewing gum in my hair and my Ma had to cut it all off, and then she went around my whole head to even it out. I looked like an umbrella for four months. Pretty embarrassing.” 

Soldier responds with the stony silence that story probably deserves. Then he says, “Should just shave it all off.” 

“Naw,” Steve says. “Your hair’s nice.” It is, kind of. Underneath the rage-sweat and the grease it’s a nice mahogany color, and it’s thick. There’s definitely some knots in there that are visibly unsalvageable, but there’s a lot of length to work with so if Steve messes up it won’t be hopeless. He’ll just cut it shorter. 

Upon second thought, though, maybe he  _ should _ do something about that rage-sweat and grease. 

Steve would use the trough, only that trickles into the ground, and he doesn’t want to poison the garden with soap along with whatever’s going to get washed off of Soldier. “Well, we might as well do this properly,” Steve says. He’s pretty sure neither an armed squad nor a fully staffed Parisian hair salon could get Soldier to take a proper shower here, but that’s just fine. They’ll just do it the old fashioned way. “Let’s give this a wash.” 

Steve finds an enameled tin basin in one of the dark Mary Poppinsesque portals that make up the cabinets in the kitchen and has Soldier fetch Steve’s shampoo. Steve sets up one the ledge of the greenhouse trough, filling the basin with water from the spigot and beckoning Soldier over with his bottle of Head & Shoulders.

“Here, sit down and lean back,” Steve says, patting the inner surface of the trough. It’s warm from the sun and won’t be too uncomfortable a seat. “We’ll lather your hair over the basin so we don’t go spilling any soap on the ground.” 

Soldier gives him a look that says pigs will parasail before he submits to any of this newly proposed torment. “You want to do it yourself?” Steve proffers the bottle. “Here. Don’t miss any spots. I’ll check.” 

Soldier looks like he’s trying to decide if it’s worth throwing a snit over, so Steve scoots himself further down the basin edge so he can put his leg up and unconcernedly start cleaning the ancient scissors.

Soldier does give him an outraged stare for a few seconds longer, but then it’s like the fight slumps out of him all at once. Steve’s alarmed enough to drop the pretense of distraction, but Soldier doesn’t see it, already turning to the basin. He dunks his hair in the trough, squelches shampoo into his flesh palm and slaps it onto his head. 

Steve tries to be at least a little discreet as an audience, but it’s hard to look away with Soldier thrashing his hair over the basin like it’s an enemy informant. There’s definitely his usual homicidal energy in that, at least. Steve wonders if it’s worth bullying Soldier into telling him what’s wrong. Maybe he should explain Tony thinks it’s  _ Steve  _ googling himself and indulging in questionable personal entertainment. 

He’ll ask some questions once Soldier's seated with a towel round his shoulders and it’s harder for him to get away. Steve decides the porch is the perfect place and goes to set things up when he deems the scissors clean enough and Soldier thoroughly sudsed. 

Steve’s gone long enough without shaving himself that getting the hot water ready and lathering up some foam feels pleasingly industrious, which makes him bustle around the porch even more extravagantly when he sees Soldier shooting him suddenly untrusting looks. He’s aware that his mimicking has become more Jeevesian cartoon butler than any self-respecting barber who has ever walked this earth, but it seems to be turning Soldier’s face red regardless so Steve hams it up. 

Soldier decides that rinsing the shampoo off involves a series of split-second dunks in the basin, which Steve supposes is as good as they’re going to get under the circumstances. When Steve holds out a towel Soldier takes it after barely a moment of looking at it like it’s roadkill Steve scraped off the side of the highway.  

The chair is a different story. It’s just a kitchen chair, made of wood and straw probably handwoven by somebody’s great-great-great-grandpappy, but Soldier rejects it completely and plunks down on the top step of the porch stairs instead. “Suit yourself,” Steve says, then pokes him with his foot. “Two steps down, champ, I gotta sit too.” 

Naturally Soldier reacts like the poke was a wasp sting, but Steve busies himself with getting his legs to cooperate while Soldier gets all the leaping and twisting and bristling out of his system. He settles eventually, on the correct step, even, which is the important thing. 

“I’m gonna touch you,” Steve warns Soldier’s extremely hiked-up shoulders. 

“I  _ know.” _

“Gonna make you the belle of the ball,” Steve says, smiling, which makes Soldier growl but drops his shoulders a full inch or so. “If only we had ourselves some Brylcreem.” 

“What the fuck is Brylcreem,” Soldier mutters. 

“It’s what makes men beautiful,” Steve says very seriously. “Alright, here we go.”

Soldier never loses the tension in his shoulders, but he doesn’t try to stab or run away as Steve gets combing and cutting. He can’t quite keep still either, which Steve doesn’t blame him for, but it does make for slow going so as not to accidentally slice off an ear. Cut hair cascades down his shoulders, and after a few minutes of twitching like a horse with flies Soldier jerks up, wrestles out of his wet shirt and sits back down. After another few minutes he jumps up to do the same with his pants, glaring at Steve like he’s daring him to make an issue of it and somehow managing to look menacing with one side of his hair six inches shorter than the other. 

“Buddy,” Steve says, “wear whatever you want, but if you keep hopping around with no warning I can’t promise I’ll be fast enough to pull these scissors back in time. I want to cut nothing but hair today, so let’s really try and keep to that, alright?” 

Soldier huffs and drops back to the chair in his strawberry bloomers, folding his arms and then quickly unfolding them. Then he folds them again. Steve ignores the fretful whirring of the metal arm  and gets back to barbering. Mercifully most of the mats are at the back of Soldier’s head, so he can just cut everything Army-short back there and move on to the top and sides. 

The end result is pretty high and tight, but the important thing is that it’s completely tangle-free. And clean. 

The only downside is that this fresh new look only highlights Soldier’s - for lack of a better word - beard. “Are you done yet,” Soldier demands, but not in a way that indicates violence is imminent. 

“Shave first,” Steve says. 

“A  _ shave?” _

“You look like you went down on a dead hedgehog,” Steve says frankly. “If you want a beard, you’re gonna have to regrow a new one from scratch.” 

Soldier gives Steve a look of poetic revulsion, but he does allow the lather on and stays in his seat. The shave takes a bit longer: Steve has to crouch down in front of him, knee complaining, and focus pretty closely to avoid any slips, because he’s never shaved any face but his own and it’s surprisingly tricky. 

It doesn’t help that Soldier keeps squinting and twitching like a rabbit with palsy every time the razor turns or Steve shifts his weight. It hasn’t escaped Steve’s notice that Soldier’s palmed a knife at some point and gripped it tight enough he’ll get pins and needles when he finally lets go, and Steve’s pretty sure he’s going to have to replace some of these porch steps by the time they finish. Still, every time he moves to stop, the kid winds up even more, so Steve tries to be quick and efficient. 

Without, obviously, slicing anything and getting in a knife fight with a half-shaved rabid bulldog with weird pornography preferences.

All in all, Steve thinks, nearing the finish line, not bad for his barbershop debut. He uses the razor to neaten up the edges of Soldier’s hairline, on his neck and under his ears and around the nape, then hands over the damp towel so he can wipe his face off. “Alright, let’s see it,” Steve says. Then, when Soldier turns around - 

“Bucky?”

It just slips out. Steve doesn’t mean to say it, but the resemblance is so strong that for a second it’s like the world wavers around him. It’s - older, rougher, more scars, more years, but the shape of the jaw, the mouth, the forehead - they could be brothers. Twins.

Steve’s opening his mouth to apologize when it registers that Soldier is looking a lot more horrified than the situation warrants. 

“Sorry,” Steve says, but Soldier’s already leapt up. 

_ “What did you say,” _ he demands. 

“I… you just remind me of someone I knew,” Steve says slowly, not taking his eyes off Soldier’s face. His familiar face. “Bucky Barnes. He was -”

“How do you  _ know that!”  _ Soldier yells, seizing Steve by the shirtfront. “ _ Who the hell is Bucky?”  _

-o-

“Hey, Sam,” Steve says into his cell, slowly. “I need a sanity check.”

“Oh man, I love those. Shoot,” Sam says. He sounds pretty distracted, but he answered the phone instead of letting it go to voicemail so he’s probably just looking for his keys or something. 

Maybe it’s actually best if Sam isn’t listening to this with his full attention. “I…” Steve rubs the back of his neck, trying to figure out where to start. “...think you might have to see it in person. It’s… Natasha dropped this kid off with me a couple month ago, and he’s real beat up - in the head, mostly, but. Anyway. I just gave him a haircut. And a shave. And - he looks like Bucky, Sam, just - dead ringer. And then,” Steve says, checking his own forehead for fever with his other hand, “when I  _ said _ Bucky, he jumped up and asked me how I knew that name. Like he recognized it.” He checks for fever again. He doesn’t  _ think  _ he’s been out in the sun too much these past few days, but who fucking knows at this point. Maybe he should stick his head in a bucket of water regardless.  

“Bucky,” Sam says. Unfortunately he sounds like he’s paying plenty of attention now. “That kid in your old unit who lied about his age but was so good at murder that nobody really called him on it?” 

“Yeah.”

“And then he died?”

“Yeah,” Steve says, more subdued. It’s been nearly two decades since, for him, but in a lot of ways that loss runs deeper than a lot of others. It’s not just that Bucky had been too young; most of the men were too young on the front. But Bucky had been his, in some strange, probably not quite moral way. He had an infectious kind of personality and he’d been absolutely fearless. Probably could’ve used a bit less of that, frankly, given how unapologetically open he had been about wanting to get in Steve’s pants. 

“O-kay,” Sam says, only sounding a little bit like he thinks Steve should stick his head in a bucket. “Well. Sounds like you two need to talk about it.” 

“He’s currently hiding in the barn.” 

“So get him out. Be the bigger person and drag him kicking and screaming into adult conversation.” 

“The Wilson Method,” Steve says. 

“Effective in one hundred percent of cases. Not like you’ll get any intel on this just talking to me. Call me back, though,” Sam says. “Just because you probably don’t have Rocky Mountain Cabin Fever or whatever doesn’t mean the situation isn’t hinky.” 

“Right,” Steve says, troubled, signing off with Sam and lowering the phone. What’s he even going to  _ say?  _ Hey, are you my dead best friend from World War Two? No? Might you perchance also be suffering from Rocky Mountain crazy fever? 

Steve goes inside. He needs to - figure this out. Put it down on paper, probably. Knock it into some kind of sense. He ends up staring around the kitchen like he’s never seen it before and fumbling through various drawers before he manages to find some paper and sit down, staring blankly at the yellowed sheets. 

There’s… probably an explanation to this that isn’t ‘he is James Buchanan Barnes, somehow survived the past hundred years and turned up looking no older than maybe thirty-two’. 

Steve writes out the most likely alternate hypotheses. 

 

  * __Shellshock finally catching up__


  * _Brain fever. Sunstroke? Hallucinations_


  * _Robots (again)_


  * _Clone?_


  * _Skrull_



 

Here he pauses. He’s seen Soldier bleed from approximately eighty cat scratches and it had been red human blood every time, so Skrull’s right out. Robots too, probably. Besides, you can’t Skrull a dead person. 

He frowns and writes  _ Skrull of clone?? _ under the last item, but even that’s halfhearted. It’s not a very good list. So far the most likely candidates are shellshock and some kind of malfunction of the brain. He’s about due for some kind of psychotic break, he reflects blankly. He’d been doing suspiciously well for a while there. It’s probably his turn again on the cosmic wheel of crap. 

Bucky died. He fell down nearly six hundred feet, in a mountain gorge, in the dead of winter. Nobody survives that. 

Steve would. 

But Steve’s - he’s, well, himself. He survived sixty years in Arctic ice. And more recently several thousand tons of assorted building material crashing on and in some cases through him. 

_ Amnesia,  _ Natasha’d said.  _ Brainwashed. Prisoner of war.  _

It can’t be him. 

_ He’s enhanced, like you are.  _

Maybe he’s a  _ new  _ kind of Skrull.

He’s not gonna fucking find out by sitting here. They’ve got to talk about this. Sam’s right. “Mother of Christ,” Steve blows out under his breath, and goes to set up the grill. 

-o-

Captain has started cooking something outside. By the smell of it, it’s an entire pig that died by way of drowning in barbecue sauce. The smell has all the barn cats up and moving around, twining hopefully around Soldier’s boots.

Soldier doesn’t move. He knows an ambush setup when he smells one.

Sure enough, it’s barely five more minutes before Captain’s voice drifts in from outside. “Hey,” he calls. He sounds… strange. Hesitant. “There’s dinner, if you want to come out. Or. I’ll leave the plate.”

He’s never coming out. He’ll live off eating straw and then he’ll die. The barn cats can have his rotting body, unless Bessie gets to it first.

One of the cats  _ mrrps _ and rubs against his leg. Goddamn vulture. He bares his teeth at it. It scrubs its face on his shin and climbs onto his thigh. 

“If you need.... You need some time, champ, that’s okay,” Captain’s voice floats up. “I’m here if you want to - talk about it.”

_ Talk  _ about it? He’s never going to talk about it. There is no  _ it  _ to talk about. He’s maintained that stance for nearly two months and he can  _ damn well  _ keep going, even if Captain had said the - the word, the name, and - Soldier can’t pretend it’s all just a brain glitch anymore. 

Well, he’ll just have to  _ pretend a little harder.  _

A horrible thought seizes him. This - he - if all the memories are  _ true, _ then Captain was his commanding officer. And now, in absence of any others, delivered here by Widow, he might be again. He’s not  _ acting  _ like he wants to pick up his plastic Commander SHIELD badge again, but - 

Well, if he  _ does,  _ Soldier is  _ not gonna obey.  _

He has been disobeying for two months now. Pushed face-first up against _this -_ if _Captain_ knows the Bucky name too, then he can’t pretend it away any longer. It’s not just in his head. And if he can’t deny that, he can’t deny the rest of it. He’s not biding his time. He’s not collecting intel. He’s just disobeying direct orders, sitting here on his ass, refusing to go back to the vault. 

He’s defected. He defected the moment he stopped trying to kill Widow. There are no excuses for him. He’s an asset gone rogue, and to any HYDRA agent he is now an enemy combatant. 

He’s still valuable. He could go back. Submit to correction. Beg. There’s a pretty fucking decent chance they’ll take him in, especially after interrogation turns up where he’s been and with who these past weeks. It wouldn’t be - good - but he could go back. 

They’d wipe him, probably twice for good measure, and turn him right around and send him out after Captain. 

Soldier’s fingers dig into the straw. The cat on his leg makes a complaining noise and hops off, giving him an insulted look. Soldier tries to unclench at least some muscles before he compromises himself further. 

Outside, Captain sighs. It’s not loud but Soldier can hear it perfectly. “You know, I wasn’t exactly having the time of my life out here before you came around,” he says, his voice quiet. Like he’s talking to himself. “It’s been just me and Bessie, and you know she’s no fun on Friday nights. There’s the chickens, I guess, but they’re really more of a hostile occupation.” 

There’s some silence, and another soft exhalation. 

“I don’t know what’s going on. But I like you. You’ve kept me good company, and if nothing else I owe you a favor, for that. Whatever it is we’re dealing with, I want to help out.” 

Soldier digs his hands further into the wooden beams of the loft. Bees drone outside. The cat washing itself a few feet away stops and looks him over, like it’s trying to decide whether he’s sane enough to use as a cushion again. 

“And if you are Bucky,” Captain says, then stops. He sighs again, this time just barely on the edge of hearing. “I just miss you, champ.” 

His voice is low, and tired, and it sounds so much like the echoes in Soldier’s dreams that it propels him out of the barn, the terrifying directionless rage burbling up and sending him stomping across the yard and right at Captain.  _ “Who the hell is Bucky,”  _ he hisses, stopping short of shoving a finger in his chest because he’s reminded  _ again  _ that he only comes up to the man’s shoulder. “Tell me  _ now,”  _ Soldier snarls. “No more - jokes, and -  _ lying -  _ tell me  _ right now. What the hell is going on.”  _

“I don’t know,” Captain says immediately. His eyes are rapt on Soldier’s face, wide and searching. He looks like he’s finding what he’s looking for. “I don’t know how it’s possible. You - Bucky died in 1944. But you… look like him. Almost exactly like him.” Captain’s eyes meet his. “And you recognized the name.” 

The name that can’t be anyone’s but his. “You  _ knew,”  _ Soldier says furiously. “You  _ knew  _ I was -” 

“I didn’t,” he says immediately. “I didn’t, Buck. I swear -”

_ “Liar!”  _

“I knew you reminded me of somebody,” he says heavily. “I just thought it was Natasha.”

Because Soldier had worked with the Widow too, once upon a time. A time he had been made to forget. They said he didn’t need to remember and he thought they were right, no clutter, no noise, no distractions from the mission, but it’s proving to be a  _ pretty fucking critical lapse of intel now.  _

“You didn’t know,” Captain says, still looking at him. “That you’re… Bucky.” 

“I’m the Winter Soldier,” he grinds. 

“What’s your name?” Captain asks gently. “Your real name. Not your callsign.” 

Soldier has no answer to that. The lack is damning. 

“There’s a lot about you online, and in books,” Captain says, still soft. “People got real interested in the Howlies, after - the Howling Commandos I mean. Our squad. There’s some biographies.” He takes his phone out and unlocks it, offers it in an open palm. “You can look it up for yourself. James Buchanan Barnes.” 

It would have presented less danger if Captain had removed the pin and held out a live grenade. What Captain is saying - it’s  _ wrong _ , it has to be wrong, only Soldier already knows - he already knew - 

He had asked. It was not encouraged but he’s not an idiot, he knows it’s not normal to have no name.  _ Everyone  _ has a name. He’d needed  _ some  _ kind of answer.

“They said I had no family. That I volunteered.” The words feel scalding in his mouth, hot as coals. “I was - a Russian soldier.” He  _ was,  _ he remembers the training, the uniforms, the deployments. 

He also remembers Captain. He remembers forgetting. Over and over. Being  _ made  _ to forget. 

There’s salt and wet in his eyes and throat and it feels like hot metal, squeezed out between the seams of some giant hydraulic press. He snatches the phone out of Captain’s hand, but he can’t bring himself yet to look at it, to type anything in. The last time he’d been handed a phone and told to google something the resulting intel had damn near blown the top of his head off. 

“Widow,” he says as the thought unfolds. She’s the one who brought him here. Of  _ course  _ she brought him here. If she knew - she  _ knew  _ this would compromise him - 

“I don’t think she knows who you are,” Captain says slowly, like he’s reading it all off Soldier’s face. “She wouldn’t keep something like this from me. Or from you, either, I bet.” 

Soldier’s metal hand clenches and unclenches, the servos letting out faint whines. “She’s not telling you a lot of other things.” 

Captain sighs, like he can barely care that Widow might be snowing him. “I was retired,” he says. “When the Battle of Manhattan happened. I’d agreed to train some agents and lead some exercises, but Sam was Captain America and Maria Hill was Commander of SHIELD. I was out. I’d enrolled in art school again. There’s a lot of things Natasha has no reason to tell me anymore.” 

“Like  _ this.”  _

“I really don’t think she knew. If she did, what does she gain from not telling us? It would’ve made me  _ more  _ invested in spending time with you, and that’s what she wanted here.”

“Coincidences like this don’t  _ just happen,”  _ Soldier grinds. 

“Sometimes they do,” Captain says. “In 1944 I crashed a HYDRA airplane into Greenland. Off the coast. And somehow the ship didn’t sink that deep, but just deep enough, that the temperatures froze me into a stasis situation. That’s why I’m here. I was found in 2006 -” 

Soldier is briefly distracted from his current fucking existential exigency by the new, fresh debacle Captain’s just trotted out for him. “You _crashed_ a _plane into an iceberg?”_

Captain looks surprised at his tone. “I had to,” he says. “A lot of lives were on the line. Civilians. HYDRA was trying to drop dirty bombs over New York, London, Paris. We had to stop them.” 

The whining of servos is getting louder. When Soldier had googled him, there had been a lot of information about Captain America, wartime propaganda powerhouse - bright costume, shiny smile, tight tights. He could tie together the two personas in his head - Captain was, for a time, Captain  _ America - _ but they’re like cats who wouldn’t sit next to each other, oil and water, separating and slipping away. This burly bearded freckle-ridden freak and the cowled red white and blue. Captain America… who ran SHIELD ops. 

But he’s not talking like someone who knew SHIELD and HYDRA missions were often one and the same. Who killed himself to stop one. 

Soldier looks down at the phone. His thumb clenched against the screen has kept it active, unlocked. 

There are things that are adding up and things that aren’t. But HYDRA lied to him. That he knows for sure. 

He has to know the truth. 

-o-

It’s only a few minutes before Bucky -  _ Bucky,  _ alive, older, scarred and changed but  _ alive -  _ drops the phone and whirls off. Steve lurches forward and then wavers, trying to figure out if it'd hurt or help to follow him, but the point becomes moot because Soldier comes to an abrupt stop, whips out one of his knives and hurls it into the side of the barn hard enough to embed it to the hilt. A second knife follows it, so Steve decides this falls under healthy self-expression and doesn’t interfere. 

Bucky runs out of knives - Steve still has it in him to marvel at how he manages to fit so many in those bloomers - but he only yanks them out and starts again, this time hurling them into the scattered grove of trees by the barn. He’s coiled up like a cornered cat and his ribs are heaving with deep breaths but his hands don’t falter in their rhythm, repeating his throws one after another. 

He doesn’t look like he’s about to run away or do anything drastic, at least. If  _ Steve  _ is finding this a lot to process, then the processing Sol -  _ Bucky  _ is doing has got to be industrial. 

Brainwashed, Natasha had said. Bucky hadn’t even recognized his own name. Natasha had hinted a few times, briefly, that it was possible to suppress certain memories and even implant new ones, but... your own  _ name.  _

What the hell had  _ happened  _ to him? 

Steve has about twenty minutes of standing on the porch, distantly registering the steady thunk of Bucky’s knives, trying to figure out how the hell to ask  _ hey, what the fuck happened to make you lose your memory, personality and entire left arm  _ in the least horrible way, when his phone lights up where Bucky had dropped it 

It’s a text from Sam:  _ ETA 5 min. _ Steve abruptly straightens. If Sam’s showing up on such short notice that means something’s up. 

Sam lands in the driveway, and it’s such a relief to see him that Steve stumps over immediately for a hug, hardly waiting for the wings to retract. “You got no idea how good your timing is,” Steve says into his shoulder. “Welcome to the holler.”

Sam pulls back to squint at him from two inches away. “Did you… is that supposed to be a  _ twang?  _ An honest-to-god  _ Southern twang?” _

“God ain’t got nothing to do with it,” Steve says darkly.

“Sweet Jesus.”

“Now you’re just trying to out-Southern me,” Steve says, reluctantly letting go. It’s  _ really  _ good to see Sam. He’s just so solid and sane. 

“I don’t gotta out-Southern  _ anyone _ , I’m  _ Virginian. _ ”

“And now you’re intentionally adding more vowels than necessary to  _ Vir-gin-ni-yuh  _ like you think I can’t tell what you’re doing.” 

“I’m not proving myself to you.  _ You’re _ a city-grown imposter. We need to get you the hell out of this farm. It’s doing things to you that I don’t like or approve of.” 

“You don’t have to tell me twice,” Steve says, thinking about the cow milk. Thirty percent of his childhood diet was raw liver; he  _ used  _ to think it couldn’t get more disgusting than that, even in the Army. Clearly he  _ used  _ to be a fool. 

Then it fully registers that Sam’s in body armor, the shield in its harness between the wings on his back. “What’s going on?”

“Let’s go inside and I’ll brief you,” Sam says. 

“Sure,” Steve says. It can’t be that urgent, or Sam wouldn’t have taken the time to hug it out and make fun of him. It also means he can probably ask Sam’s help for the Bucky situation, thank god. “You can try some of my lemonade.”

“Not on your fucking life,” Sam says, and then they round the house in time to see Bucky stomp out of the distant trees with his handful of knives, take up position and start to throw again, either oblivious or dead set on ignoring them.

Sam, though, stops short. He’s looking right at Bucky. “Ohhhhhshit.” 

“What,” Steve says. 

“That’s the kid?”

“Yeah -”

“And that’s a metal arm? Not - tinfoil or something?” 

“No, it’s metal,” Steve says warily. “He opens bottle caps with it.” 

“Hooooo wee. O-kay. So. You know what. I think now is the time to talk about what I’ve been doing for the past three months.” 

-o-

Sam tells him. It takes a while. 

“So let me get this straight,” Steve says. “You and Natasha. Discover HYDRA infiltration in SHIELD. All the way up to the Secretary of State. And you don’t call me?” 

“Because you were  _ regrowing your leg, dude,”  _ Sam says. They’re on the porch, because Sam refused to go inside and has kept one eye on Bucky the entire time he was talking. “And Natasha needed you to sit on Baby Crazy over there. I don’t know how destructive that kid was as your golf cadet or whatever, but these days it’s  _ way the fuck worse.”  _

“Wait, you…” Steve trails off, pieces slotting together. “He was active in  _ DC?”  _

“That’s what I’m saying, man,” Sam says. “He nearly fucking killed both of us, and Carter too. I don’t know what Natasha did to shut that down but I thought she’d put a bullet in the back of his head from a thousand yards or whatever. She said it was handled.” Sam pulls a face. “And I guess it was, if he recognized you.”

Steve stares out at Bucky, who is still perforating the trees with grim fervor. Then he presses his hands over his face. Alright. Okay. There was an attempted Nazi coup of the United States government while he was out here roasting marshmallows and playing Happy Farm Animals with - Bucky. Bucky, who isn’t dead. Bucky, who was apparently trying to kill _Sam_ shortly before arriving here. Because the _reason_ Bucky’s here now, cussing at cows and stomping around in grandma underwear, is that when he fell off the train he _hadn’t_ died but did get taken prisoner. By HYDRA. Again. 

“I’m coming in,” Steve says. 

“No damn argument,” Sam says immediately. “You are  _ sure _ that’s your boy, though, right?”

“It’s Bucky,” Steve says. “Definitely Bucky. And he didn’t recognize me. Not right away. We -”

Bucky’s suddenly  _ right _ there, eyes wild, knife in his metal hand. Steve has a split second to wonder what the hell he said to make Bucky practically teleport before he jerks up his hand in the  _ halt  _ sign and says  _ “Listen.” _

“What?” Steve says, automatically stepping forward to put himself between Bucky and the pistol Sam was remarkably quick in pulling.

“Cars,” Bucky says. His look is like nothing Steve’s ever seen on him before, and it’s not the shave and haircut: he’s wide-eyed and intense, blank and poised in utter stillness, not even seeming to notice Sam.

“You hear something?” Sam says warily, his gun barely lowered and his eyes not leaving Bucky for a second. 

“Not just cars,” Bucky breathes, but Steve can hear it now too. 

“Sam,” he raps, but Sam’s already flaring his wings, the jets powering up. “I’ve got my pistols, that’s it. Here,” he says, unhooking the shield and slinging it at Steve as he starts to rise. 

Steve immediately grabs Bucky’s flesh arm and yanks the shield onto it, ignoring his jerk and sputter. “You can give this back when you’ve put on body armor,” Steve says, and shoves him towards the barn just as the first of the convoy barrels up the driveway. 

Steve’s options are kinda limited. They’re outnumbered and outgunned, and the farm isn’t exactly sprouting weaponry. The front yard doesn’t have much in it at all, save what he’s been using for weightlifting. 

When the first SUV skids around the last bend, Steve hurls the tractor engine block straight through the windshield. The ensuing crash and pileup lets him dodge in, climb the hood, yank the block up and throw it at the next one, his knee screaming. Sam opens fire from above as hostiles start pouring from the back vehicles; that buys Steve time to duck into the front of the ruined car and find a rifle that’s not too badly bent. 

He rolls out of the car to find Soldier -  _ Bucky _ has not gone for the defense systems in the outhouse. He has instead charged in, right behind Steve, while pantsless and barefoot. Steve swears and covers him as best he can. 

It’s a great time to realize he hadn’t actually given the order for Bucky to trigger the defenses. It’s the first thing Natasha would have gone for, but if Steve’s learned nothing else over these past few months it’s that Soldier -  _ Bucky _ \- is definitely not Natasha. “Outhouse _ ,”  _ Steve bellows in his direction, and thank god Bucky gets it and immediately disengages with his opponent, lunging for the farm. 

Five agents go after him. Steve gets himself in the middle of that and gets obstructionist about it, hoping like hell Soldier will find the right button on the first try. Steve should’ve showed him right at the start, but no time for backseat quarterbacking now. Sam’s very good but he didn’t come dressed for this kind of party and Steve’s leg is letting him know his current performance is on a rapidly contracting countdown. He’s never seen the farm’s defensive measures deployed before but Natasha had explained the theory; if it works it won't solve all their problems but it’ll definitely give them some maneuverability. 

Only if they don’t fuck it up. “Sam, down!” Steve yells at what he hopes is the right time, and they’ve fought together enough that Sam immediately drops like a rock back towards the farmhouse. 

Just in time. There’s a noise like God’s spatula coming down full force on a bongo drum. The air sizzles and pops, making Steve’s inner ear experience what popcorn kernels go through in the microwave before everything snaps back to normal again.

Steve wasn’t the only one to stumble, but thanks to the leg he’s not the fastest to recover either, so he reengages the two closest agents as Sam swoops back up from his drop. The defenses worked: a purplish force field had cut the company of hostiles in half, leaving only six on the inside with Sam and Steve, and that’s odds they can work with. 

There’s a tight moment where Steve’s knee pink slips it and makes him take the fight to the ground, but he’s no slouch when it comes to grappling. Steve rolls off the newly deceased just as Soldier reappears around the edge of the farmhouse, bloomers flapping, and takes down the last assailant with a thrown knife. 

Steve gets most of the way into a crouch, panting, and Sam’s scanning the area with his pistols up, but they’re in the clear. The team left on the outside of the barrier has regrouped and looks to be essaying a retreat, flinging themselves and their gear into the remaining vehicle and lurching back onto the road like a particularly horrible clown car. 

“Like I said,” Sam says, “Nazis.” 

“I believed you without the live demo,” Steve says, standing up on his second try and limping to the barrier. 

“Should you be putting weight on that leg?” Sam calls. 

“The pins were due to come out anyway.” Steve bends close to the barrier. It’s a lot less purple up close, a wobbly layer of warping air like a soap-bubble film, going all the way down to the ground. The nodes must’ve been buried underground, Steve realizes, and has to suppress a snort at the thought of Natasha out here some summer digging holes and setting it all up. 

He straightens up and turns back, where Bucky and Sam are watching each other with their weapons still very much in their hands. Bucky’s eyes are slowly narrowing. “You took out Alpha STRIKE,” he says.  

“Yup,” Sam says. “It’s generally what I do with people who try to kill me.” 

Bucky’s eyes narrow further. “I tried to kill you.” 

“Yeah, but I hear you’re less crazy now,” Sam says, guns still out. “Sup.” 

“Nobody’s killing each other,” Steve says, limping back to them and waving a hand at all the corpses. “Save up all of that for these guys. Half of them got away.” 

Bucky, surprisingly, rounds on him.  _ “You  _ did _ all that stuff on purpose,”  _ he snaps, glaring red-eyed. “The fucking - turnips and the chickens and the  _ fishing.  _ That was all  _ to drive me up the wall.”  _

“Well... yeah,” Steve says, because it’s not like he can deny it. “But that’s just who I am as a person. Besides, you called me an invalid.” 

_ “So?”  _

“So it’s like those guys calling you dyke.” Which, having looked the word up, is a whole new cause for hilarity. Steve supposes it was technically  _ possible  _ to mistake Soldier for a woman, given his size and hair, but most women wouldn’t appreciate the comparison. Probably not even now that he looks like a rather avant-garde kind of underwear model. “And all the death threats issued were coming from your camp, if I remember correctly.” 

“Okay,  _ what _ the fuck were y'all doing out here,” Sam says. 

_ “Suffering,”  _ Bucky says emphatically.

“I can see we’re all going to get along great,” Steve says. “Did anyone see where my phone went? We need to call Natasha.”

Sam holds up something Steve recognizes as one of Tony’s private further-higher-faster gadgets. “Called her. She’s gonna get us a chopper.” 

Steve looks around, putting his hands on his hips and then wincing when he realizes he’s split his palm open at some point and just got blood all over his shirt. More blood, looks like. He sighs. “We better get cleaned up. And pack.” 

Bucky shifts. “This extraction is permanent,” he says, not quite asking. 

“Well, this place just got pretty fuckin’ compromised,” Sam says. “And will only get more compromised when the giant chopper comes down to pick us up.”

“We’ll probably go to -” Steve was about to say DC, but he doesn’t know whether that’s a viable base anymore given that  _ apparently  _ SHIELD’s been ass deep in Nazis this whole time. He looks at Sam. “New York?”

“New York,” Sam confirms. “Stark’s got a helipad we can use. It’s gonna be as-we-go from there. Things’ve been kinda… hectic.”

Steve looks at him. “You don’t say.”

“Yeah. Fury shot the Secretary of Defense in the face.”

“No shit?” 

“No shit. It was great.”

Steve looks at Bucky to see if he’s up for this. Bucky’s looking at Sam like he just told them he’d personally blown up the moon. “Pierce, right?” Steve says, casually. “He was HYDRA?”  

Bucky’s face snaps down into grim determination. “Yes,” he says definitively. “He was in charge.” 

“Not anymore,” Sam says brightly. 

Bucky’s fists clench, one hand giving a knife a businesslike flip. “Cut off one head,” he says. 

“We’ve been cutting off a lot more than just one,” Sam says. “It’s been kinda busy out there.”

“Widow,” Bucky starts, then stops. “Widow said. She wanted my help.” 

“If you want,” Steve says. It was clear to anyone that Bucky’s been through a lot, even before Steve knew he was Bucky. He’s clearly a capable fighter, but Steve’s not gonna see him pushed into another war. 

Bucky’s lip curls, showing some teeth. “I defected,” he says, tossing his head at all the extremely stabbed bodies lying around him. “They  _ lied.” _

“Great,” Sam says. “Natasha’ll be thrilled. She’s been talking about how the ratio of American supersoliders to Soviet assassins is really unbalanced, which in retrospect means I should have seen this whole thing coming.”  

“Well, if you do want to help,” Steve says, watching Buck’s face carefully and trying not to sound too hopeful. “I could use a partner.”

“Yeah, if you join in, we’ll top ‘shooting the SecDef in the face’ in the batshit olympics in no time,” Sam says. 

“What about,” Bucky says, then stops when they both look at him. His jaw clenches and his chin sticks out. It’s strange to see such a - familiar Soldier expression without the beard and hanks of hair everywhere. “What about the cats.” 

“We can bring the cats,” Steve says, unable to help his smile. 

“I thought they were feral, _ ”  _ Sam mutters. “Like everything else on this farm.” 

“They’ll learn,” Steve says. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> adding a note to say i have a couple snackfic sequelets in the works bc i just realized they dont actually bone down in this one


	5. we followed him home and we're keeping him: epilogue (art)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> ...and they all lived happily ever after.

[ ](https://www.flickr.com/photos/160995661@N05/46595405585/in/dateposted-public/)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AN ENTIRE BARN OF STRAWBERRIES TO SILENTWALRUS YOU ABSOLUTE LEGEND. 
> 
> Sometime far in the future:
> 
> Interviewer: So, Marchioness Q, could you share with our audience some of your favorite fandom original characters?   
> Me: they're farm animals  
> Interviewer:   
> Me: it's chad's fault

**Author's Note:**

> The “Wodehouse” text is actually the first line of [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13098534) by Persiflager, which you should all go read right now. I’ve laughed myself hysterical reading it MULTIPLE times
> 
> YOU WANNA SEE SOME AMAZING FUCKIN ART FOR THIS FIC? [CLICK HERE](https://superhumandisasters.tumblr.com/post/180541820011/i-cant-stop-thinking-about-silentwalrus1s)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] ain't really quaint](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15966656) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)
  * [His Aim Is Unparalleled](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15972962) by [deisderium art (Deisderium)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deisderium/pseuds/deisderium%20art)
  * [Chickens](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16182698) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)
  * [The Intern](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18191822) by [quietnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quietnight/pseuds/quietnight)




End file.
